The Boy in The Moon Reading Blog

Part A
In the early portion of chapter eleven, Ian Brown describes the life that he wants Walker to have. He says he wants him to be cared for and all of the required things be taken care of for Walker, but also to be “loved and forgiven.” After he finishes writing a story about Walker, the communications director for the L’Arche community invites him to Montreal to visit their community. Ian is completely blown away and says as his first impression, “I saw for the first time the outline of the unthinkable community I was looking for. In that community, I was the stranger.” (187) The way that Ian describes his experiences at L’Arche and the way he views it are oddly similar to my experiences and views on L’Arche. He describes how before he gets there he is anxious and timid about the whole idea, just as I was before going, but as he starts to have conversations and be a part of their community he says, “Surrounded for the first time in my life by intellectually disabled adults I had only just met, I suddenly realized I didn’t feel nervous anymore.” (190). Ian explains how people are just accepted for who they are in this world and that is one of the things that I liked the most about L’Arche. Whatever comes to one of these handicapped peoples minds they can just blurt it out without feeling nervous or judged or hated for being different.

In Montreal, Ian goes to visit one of these homes that members of the L’Arche community live in. A girl named Natalie who works with L’Arche says, “The biggest challenge for me is to be with people who aren’t handicapped, it’s more difficult to accept them. It’s easier with Isabelle. In my head, when Isabelle or Madeleine make things strange I think, oh, that’s just because they have a handicap. But I can’t use that excuse with normal people who don’t have disabilities, when they make things strange.” (192) Natalie goes on to say that handicapped people have more to teach us “normal” people than we have to teach them. On of the things she says we can learn is to act like yourself no matter what situation you are brought up with. Handicapped people can only act like themselves and thus teach us a valuable lesson. I believe from just my one visit to the L’Arche community that we can learn this and much more things from the disabled.

Part B
From what I have learned about Ian Brown’s novel, The Boy in The Moon, I get the sense that he is incredibly honest in the emotions that he has towards his relationship with Walker. You would expect that someone writing a book about the severely handicapped would sensor the emotions the author feels by fabricating the details. This is not at all the case when Ian describes his true emotions in having a severely handicapped child. “For all this nightly nightmare – the years of desperate worry and illness and chronic sleep deprivation, the havoc he has caused in our lives, threatening our marriage and our finances and our sanity – I long for the moment when he lets his crazy formless body fall asleep against me…Walker, my teacher, my sweet, sweet, lost and broken boy.” (7)

Ian describes the pain he goes through with seeing his child not being able to “perform” in such a demanding society we live in. It was interesting and yet deeply disturbing to learn of Ian’s daily life with Walker and the sorrow and helplessness that goes with it. He knows from seeing so many medical professionals that they really don’t know the answer to Walker’s problem and I can relate to this in my own much milder way. As many people know I’m a profoundly passionate runner and am pretty accomplished in running. About a year and a half ago I started to have trouble doing what I love because of extreme pains in my knees and hips. This just recently evolving into a very serious injury where my hip flexor muscle ripped off my pelvic bone, tearing a chunk of bone off with it. When I go to see countless doctors, surgeons, sports therapist etc. all “professionals,” I never get a straight answer as to how to fix the problem. When Ian talks about his child being so helpless and no one knowing how to fix his much more severe problem, I can relate entirely to how he feels, and can only imagine how extreme this feeling must be for him. Ian mentions Walker’s helplessness when talking of the medical toys that are prescribed to Walker to “fix” his problem. “…we reach this tiny, ugly, brutal, awkward, clumsy, two-holed yellow plastic corner of the system that has been reserved for my unfixable boy. The touching hopefulness and yet utter hopelessness of that label…Each yellow bucket as awkward to operate as the next one; each one a reminder of how dark and murky and flat-out basic our understanding of childhood development actually is, how little we know." (20-21)

Part C
Questions for Ian:
1) You mentioned in the book that you like to believe that Walker loves you; do you truly believe that he loves you?
2) Could you describe the feeling that you got when people didn’t know how to help your boy, but claimed that their product from government agencies would benefit Walker?
3) What reason did you have for writing a book about Walker and your difficulties in raising him? Was it to vent?