A Little Adventure

The following story involves underwear, but is 100% G rated. Also, I asked Anne’s permission to share it, and she agreed.

Today I took my younger sister, Anne, out for lunch. Anne has Down Syndrome and lives in a residential community here in Austin that she loves. She’s famous in our family for hanging up the phone after a five minute conversation with a hurried, “Well, I better let you go [click].” So I try to take her out to lunch as often as I can to get the real scoop on how she is doing.

We had a great conversation at lunch, during which I told her my plans to become a licensed foster parent this fall. We had talked about it before, and she was very enthusiastic, but I wanted to let her know that things were actually moving along faster than I had originally thought they would. She was all in favor of it; I had worried she might be jealous of my time, but she was really sweet and excited about it.

We had some time on our hands at the end of lunch, and we often stop by the local drugstore to pick up various things she needs. She usually needs cleaning supplies, as she has elevated “neat freak” to a whole new level. Today she said she needed to get some (and I quote) “personal hygiene items,” so I said, “Let’s go by the drugstore on the way back.” Well it turned out that what she needed was underwear, which of course you can’t get at the drugstore (or maybe you can, but I doubt you’d want to). I asked her how many pairs she had, and she said “two.” This sent me into something of a bewildered panic, since no one likes to hear that a loved one is making do with only two pairs of underwear. After much back and forth questioning, it turned out that she had been throwing underwear away (I won’t even go into the reasons, which were not logical reasons for throwing underwear away, and baffled me even further).

So I called my mom and found out where Anne gets her underwear and what size and everything. We headed to Target, and I asked Anne what color she wanted to get. She said we should get white because she had plenty of black pairs. Baffled, yet again, I turned to her and said, “What? How many black pairs do you have?” After another long back and forth which verged on the vaudevillian, we determined that Anne had in her possession not merely two pairs of underwear, but actually ten. The issue, apparently, was that she only had two clean pairs. (I should add that Friday is her laundry day, so the great underwear crisis of 2011 turned out to be not a problem at all.) But by then we had arrived at Target, Anne apologetic and me chuckling from the confusion and humor of the situation. As we pulled into a parking space, Anne put a hand on my arm and said, out of the blue, “You’re going to be a great mom.”

Anne is incredibly competent in so many ways. Her social skills put mine to shame. She adores pretty much everyone she’s ever met. She is tenderhearted with a sometimes infinite capacity for empathy, and she delights in making other people happy. She can clean and organize so well that she would easily run my house better than I do. Her faults (and as a sister, I know them well) have nothing to do with her disability—she has the family stubbornness and an inability to keep her face from showing her emotions. She is so capable, in fact, that I often forget her limitations. Until, of course, I discover that she has thrown away essential clothing and doesn’t handle numbers and preparation very well. It is impossible for her to say simply, “I’m running low on underwear and I would like to have more pairs so I don’t worry about running out of clean clothes.” It took twenty minutes (no exaggeration) of patient cross examination to figure out what the real situation was.

And yet, smack dab in the middle of a moment of alarm that she is not as capable of caring for herself as I thought she was, she stuns me with one of the kindest, truest things she has ever said. I will be a great mom. And I will owe that greatness in large part to Anne. I have trained for motherhood by loving Anne: caring for her, watching over her, protecting her, challenging her, laughing with her. And Anne has trained me for motherhood by showing me absolutely unconditional devotion, unstinting hugs, and the most abundant love I will see this side of heaven. All that is worth infinitely more than the price of an eight-pack of underwear.

“Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:5-8