"What You Pawn, I Will Redeem"

I've been reflecting lately on a wonderful short story I read a few years ago, by Sherman Alexie. It's called "What You Pawn I Will Redeem." I believe it was published in The New Yorker, and later won some awards. It's the story of a middle-aged, articulate, native American alcoholic man living on the streets of Seattle. In the story, the man (who calls himself Jackson Jackson) walks into a pawn shop with some friends one day and sees his deceased grandmother's regalia headdress in the window, for sale. He tells the owner it's his grandmother's, to no avail. The man wants a thousand dollars for it, period. He says he will hold it for twenty-four hours, and if Jackson can bring him the money, he'll sell it to him. He even gets him started with a twenty (or maybe ten) dollar bill. So Jackson Jackson sets out on his quest. He believes for a moment that if he can get that headdress back, he might bring his grandmother to life again. He is a man on a quest.

The problem is, he's an alcoholic. He manages to make a few dollars selling the local homeless newpaper, feels pleased about it, closer to his goal, and then promptly goes out and spends it on booze for him and his friends. He does this over and over again, never giving up on his quest, but each time, ending up drinking the money away, then picking himself up and starting again. At the end of the story, he shows up at the pawn shop with five dollars in his hand, all the money he possesses in the world, showing up regardless of what he has, to claim the regalia. The pawn shop owner looks at him and asks one question: "Did you work hard for this money?" Jackson says yes. The owner walks over to the window and gets the regalia and hands it to him. Jackson walks out of the pawn shop with an ecstatic shout:

"Do you know how many good men there are in the world? Too many to count!"

Then he puts on his grandmother's regalia and goes out into the street and dances, blocking traffic but not caring because for a mystical moment, he achieves some kind of union with his grandmother and feels her presence again.

This story resonates with me not only because it's a beautiful statement of perfect grace, but because Jackson's seeming helplessness reminds me of the pattern experienced by those with FASD, in particular. They wake up with the best intentions, most likely. Then they spend the rest of the day doing the wrong thing, over and over and over again. They feel guilty. They might resolve to try to never do the thing again. But before the day is over, maybe before the hour is over, they'll do it all over again. And they'll feel like dirt, feel like they're bad beyond redemption. And every day, this is repeated over and over, the cycle. It's hell.

I see this so much in my son, and it is absolutely heartbreaking. You feel so helpless and frustrated, try to keep hope and not give up, try not to show how disappointed you are. But sometimes it comes through because we're only human. My son does the wrong thing all day long, most days. He asks me, "How can I be a good person if I do bad things?" "Why do you love me when I'm so bad?" I know beyond any doubt that he would love nothing better than to have more "self-control." If you ask him one thing he could change about himself, he'll say ADHD. ADHD is what we use to explain his disability to him, the way his head works. Of course, there's more than ADHD going on, and psychological problems on top of that.

It brings to mind a fundamental dilemma: How much personal choice does he really have? Can someone who is obviously impaired in the areas of impulse control, memory, self-regulation in general, be held to the same standards as non-impaired people? Yet accepting that he will be unable to control himself means giving up on him, in some sense, giving up on the idea of his ever living any kind of normal life. Should I not make him feel guilty about taking things that don't belong to him, or lashing out physically? If not, or if we dont' try to change him, that means without a doubt he will end up in a jail or some sort of mental hospital or residential facility. That seems unbearable. How do we protect him from the consequences of his actions, impaired or not? Of course, the obvious and cliched answer is that we can't. I know that. But it's a hell of a predicament. When we talk about changing him, we're talking about trying to fix a computer that's broken, and I don't know how. It isn't that he has NO control. When the stars align, meaning when he has an adult person or some very strong limiting factor RIGHT THERE two inches from his nose, he can choose -- sometimes -- to do the "right" thing. Sometimes the right environment can make this possible. But when he's not getting immediate feedback, reinforcement, control, whatever, all bets are off. And if he goes into fight/flight too quickly, the environment or management won't matter much.

I don't know the answer. I don't know how to balance "He's got to learn somehow not to break the law" and "He has to learn to function in society" with "I know there are certain things about him that can't be changed, and I know he doesn't have the same capacities for control and self-regulation that non-impaired people do." Would it do any good to try to teach a kid with a sprained ankle to keep up with the rest of his classmates in a fifty-yard dash, or to run without a limp? Staring me in the face is this frightening and crushing fact: At nine years old, after YEARS of giving it our best shot--reward and punishment, lectures, therapy, counseling, various parenting techniques, even a few mild spankings when he was younger (until it became clear they didn't help the problem), basically giving it everything we had--he is often as violent and defiant as he was at three years old. That same kid who threw his little plastic chair at the window at three is the same one who threw his notebook at me and hit me in the arm yesterday. And it's the same kid who felt so bad and guilty and low about his behavior that he called himself "pure evil" and "idiot" a few hours later and couldn't stop making references to killing and death. 

Something in this cycle reminds me of Jackson Jackson, of his doomed life and the futility of wanting to be a  better person. Maybe someday he'll be dancing in the street after someone redeems his pawned treasures, lets him off the hook in a moment of pure grace and pardon. Or maybe it really is hopeless. That's more how I feel today.