George Santayana was right when he wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 1960, my friend John and I drove to Miami for spring break and came home with a tiny alligator we named Gerard Swope. We wanted to be cool. We thought having a pet alligator would make us cooler, and that Gerard Swope was a very cool name for an alligator.
When Gerard wouldn’t eat the small bits of meat we put in his tank — was Gerard really a “him?” — we sought advice from the owner of a neighborhood fish market who kept alligators in his display window. Mr. Fish suggested pushing food down his throat with the eraser end of a pencil.
Soon, Gerard was lunging for food, nearly removing pieces of finger with each lunge, and growing fast. Very, very fast. Cleaning his tank became dangerous, and we didn’t even like him anymore, but what could we do? Mr. Fish came to the rescue again, agreeing to place Gerard in the gator community at his market. There, Gerard kept growing while smaller gators moved in, and soon we could no longer distinguish him from the crowd. But the window could hold only so many pounds of gator flesh, and we noticed that periodically the largest reptile would vanish. I never dared to ask, but I suspect the largest became lunch for the smaller ones — and that, eventually, Gerard was the largest.
I’ve always felt guilty about my part in Gerard Swope’s short, unhappy life because Gerard’s story isn’t about an alligator. It’s about me wanting to be the kind of person who could handle something I had no business handling and somebody else getting hurt because of it.
Eighteen years later, my family and I tried adopting 8-year-old Joey Bronson, the child of a drug-addicted mother who died of an overdose when he was 2. Joey was alone in the house with her corpse for 24 hours before someone came by. His father had been shot dead earlier. A paternal uncle adopted Joey but relinquished him four years later after coming out gay and losing his marriage.
Not surprisingly, Joey trusted no one. He attacked other children (and sometimes adults), soiled his pants almost daily, disobeyed, ate with his hands, threw food, stole and destroyed property. Why? He said that at night, his mother visited him and warned him that if he ever let anyone else love him, she would stop coming.
After a year of failed foster homes, Joey was placed with well-paid, professionally-trained foster parents who didn’t need the love he couldn’t give. They treated him with kindness, respect and consistency, demanding only civility and compliance in return. Using a strict, behavior-based approach, they isolated him in a “time out” enclosure until he regained self-
control, and they worked closely with his school to maximize consistency across environments. He was never unsupervised. In this structured setting, Joey, who was smart, athletic, cute and, when not angry, quite charming, began improving. A year later, his social worker thought he might be ready for the right adoptive home.
Were we that home? We were emotionally, geographically and financially stable, with graduate degrees in social work and two well-adjusted children, one of them adopted. What could go wrong? As it turned out, a lot.
Our children had good judgment and needed little supervision. Joey made terrible decisions and needed constant supervision, but we didn’t want to treat him differently. We gave him the same freedoms. Our children attended a private school that emphasized social relationships and responsibility in an atmosphere of trust and liberty. Trust and Liberty — two conditions that would bring out the worst in Joey. But we didn’t want to make him feel different by sending him elsewhere. Not to mention our reluctance to complicate our scheduling and transportation logistics. We foolishly believed that if we loved Joey, he would love us and forget his imaginary mother.
Joey’s terrible behavior returned almost at once, lying, stealing, attacking his “siblings,” terrorizing the neighborhood and stinking up the house by soiling his pants and hiding the evidence. When I asked what he thought would become of him, he said, “I’ll fight and fight until a policeman shoots me.” Maybe that’s what happened, but we’ll never know. After almost a year, we gave up and returned Joey to the adoption agency, having done him about as much good as I did Gerard.
In the end, we proved unwilling to accept Joey as he was and give him the tight, dispassionate structure he needed. We thought we were such a cool family that Joey would give up his familiar self to become one of us. We were wrong. We weren’t cool at all. Wanting to be a particular kind of person isn’t the same as being prepared for the work that person must do, a lesson I suspect many of us learn too late. I sure did. “Those who cannot remember the past…”
Mature Content is a monthly feature from Age-Friendly Carbondale.