“Out, Out Damn Spot!” ~Lady Macbeth said to her dog …

I’ll do a couple of posts about moving your kid out, hopefully meaning into a residential facility, and discuss it in light of keeping a kid at home. Real life may get in the way so the posts may not be linear … like if I decide to tell you about the two hours last night, 8:30 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. when the school superintendent (a district of over 6,000 students) and I were going back and forth (he was real pissed … on my and Pearlsky’s side). But I digress …

Over the years I have been told that most often this population dies from aspiration … basically the wrong stuff being sucked into the lungs. Typically, in our case, it means a disabled person refluxing or vomiting while in bed and suffocating on it. Pleasant thought, no? I’ve lived 18 years knowing this.

Luckily, in humans, hearing never really sleeps (as opposed to this really cool fact on birds). That is why we awake to sounds, our brains still process them, even during sleep. That is why baby monitors work.

My ex got custody of David when we split. After a couple of years it became too much for her. She could not deal with being “on call” every night, a new husband who is anti-kid, and her own physical limitations. The nights really got to her, he was noisy at night and she was never very good at interpreting the sounds.

I could not logistically have both David and Pearlsky. My ex already had moved from down the block, where I saw my son daily, to across town, where it was more difficult. I could not take Pearlsky with me since, well, my ex’s husband had a cat and someone is severely allergic.

It turns out that one of the best residential facilities is about two hours away and the school district agreed to send him. This is vital since they pay for it! For me, it was devastating, the third time she took David from me, but I had little choice. Of course I could have stopped it, but that was not in his best interest, her mothering skills were, well, just were.

We moved him up in August, 2006.

To be continued …