When my older two children were six and eight years old we lived across the street from child abusers. Well, I really never knew for sure if they were child abusers, but from all indications they were. The woman lived with her boyfriend in an old, rundown rental house in our old neighborhood of Southeast Portland called Montavilla. The walls of their home only held nude pictures of people in various poses. This seemed very strange since they had an eight-year-old boy living there.
My daughter was in the same class as the eight-year-old even though he was two years older than her. In her words, “Percival was held back because he has a learning disability.” According to her, he was constantly disrupting class. He would get up, run around the classroom, and interrupt the teacher. When not in class, Percival tried to play with the neighborhood kids, but they often excluded him. He played long after other children were called to go in for dinner. He could be seen outside after dark wandering around by himself.
Percival told my daughter that his bedroom was in the basement. He thought of it as a fort. His mother would turn off the bare lightbulb that barely lit the area and would close and lock the door for the night. Percival could not get out or go to the bathroom until morning when she unlocked it. I couldn’t believe these accounts. My daughter was young. Maybe she didn’t quite understand. Who would do that to their only child?
Percival’s mother (whose name I never knew) and her male companion stayed to themselves. They were seldom seen outside of the house. They didn’t own a car. They never did yard work and they didn’t chit-chat at the mailbox as other neighbors did. I would occasionally catch a glimpse of the couple in their mismatched bohemian clothes as they walked toward the bus stop. They didn’t take Percival with them. Was he always left alone?
I didn’t think much more about their odd family until the day Percival’s mother knocked on our front door. At first I thought she must be reporting that our dog got out again, but she carefully explained that she and her boyfriend were going on a trip to South America for a few weeks. She asked if I could take care of Percival! I had never had a conversation with this woman before. She didn’t know me, yet here she was asking me to care for her son. She said they would be constantly traveling while away so there would be no number to call in case of an emergency. This was before the age of cell phones.
She must have seen the look of shock and disbelief on my face. I didn’t know how to reply. It seemed so absurd.
She launched into her reasoning, “It will be mutually beneficial for our children since they play together already. Plus, I have no relatives to call on.”
My children felt sorry for Percival since he was made fun of by the other children. They would include him in their play while the other children shunned him. The woman shoved an envelope with two twenty dollar bills into my hand.
“This should cover the cost of his food.” She talked fast and left a paper grocery bag of his clothes and a sleeping bag on the porch and backed away before I could reply.
“Thank you so much,” she yelled from halfway back to her house. “I will send Percival over.”
I was stunned. My first instinct was to march back across the street with the clothes and sleeping bag, give her back the envelope and deliver some choice words about irresponsible parenting. I, however, took time to reflect on the situation. I calmed down and came back inside the house and called the kids.
“Percival’s mother will be gone for a while. She wants us to take care of him while she’s on a trip to South America. What do you think about that?”
They were excited. They flooded me with a barrage of questions.
“How long will she be gone? Where will he sleep? Will he eat with us, too?” I answered their questions and then they quickly considered the proposition.
“Sure. He needs a good family. We should do this,” they said.
Children have a way of stripping away the nonessential and getting to the heart of the matter. They form judgments without the adult filters that tend to clog decision making with hesitancy, selfishness, and prejudice. I had to agree. It would be better that we cared for him in a household that would care about his emotional well-being. I went back to Percival’s house and told the mother that I would take him while she was away. She gushed with appreciation.
Percy bounded across the street with me in his tattered gym shoes and second-hand clothes, talking non-stop.
“This is great! It will be like a vacation. I get the top bunk? Wow. What should we do first? When is lunch?”
My children started out being generous hosts. They shared their toys and doted on him like an honored guest. Eventually, his exuberance started to wear on them. He was constantly in motion and talking. In retrospect, he probably had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
They included Percy in their play, games, cartoons, and meals. Soon he began exhibiting the same behavior as in the classroom. He would get in our faces and pose ridiculous questions and keep asking until we couldn’t take it any longer. He was always begging to do something that wasn’t in our routine or wasn’t allowed. Luckily, it was summertime and the kids could just run outside and he could either join them or stay inside alone. My children included Percy in their pretend scenarios whether the other neighbor kids approved or not. One taller blond boy with a lisp started picking on my kids. I watched from the front living room window that looked out onto the front yard and sidewalk.
“Why is he with you? What’s going on? My parents say that his mother is weird. Did you adopt him?” the bully asked.
“No,” my kids answered, “His mother is on vacation. He will stay with us until she comes back. That’s all.”
“That’s weird,” he replied, “Why isn’t he with his grandma or cousins or something?”
“We live across the street. It’s just easier this way,” my kids deftly deflected his inquiries.
“Besides,” the bully kept pushing, “he’s weird, just like your sister!” With this he pushed my daughter down with his skateboard.
At that point, my son hauled off and hit him. This took the blond boy by surprise and he landed on his butt on the sidewalk. Even though he was much taller than my son, he was afraid of the reaction as my son screamed at the bully.
“That’s my sister you’re talking about! Stop it or else!”
I stayed inside and just watched. I was prepared to intervene if necessary, but this appeared as a natural consequence of the blond boy’s bullying. Perhaps my son could have handled it in a less violent way, but he was eight years old and had put up with enough. After all, he had hit his sister with a skateboard. My eyes welled up with pride. My son was defending his little sister.
The kids continued to play and explore and learn together until Percy’s mother returned. I was already rehearsing my speech for the police if she had not come back from South America.
“I thought I could trust her to come back and retrieve her only child. Yes, she was strange.”
Perhaps I should have reported her to Child Protective Services. It’s hard to know which would be worse for a kid – mistreatment by a parent or relegating him to a childhood in revolving foster care homes. I often wonder where that boy is now and whether I made the right decision.
One thing is for certain, for those several weeks, Percival had a “normal” childhood. He was included in a family with all of its idiosyncrasies. He had pseudo-siblings, regular meals, baths, clean clothes, chores to do, and behavioral limits set. He enjoyed the kidding around and closeness that comes from being inside a family. This was something he could reflect on and maybe even mention to his mother to soften her treatment of him. I will never know. What I do know is that my first inclination was to judge and reject, but my children reminded me of what was more important. They guided me to accept my own teaching and realize that helping this boy was more important than making a point or being right.