One of the grey areas of dealing with R's sister Sue, who has Down's Syndrome, is understanding how far she can be held responsible for her actions. For example, when she goes into a store and shuffles out again with her pockets stuffed with erasers. Does she
understand that she's stealing? She knows that you can't walk into a store and take whatever happens to catch your fancy. You're supposed to take items to the cash and pay for them. The erasers aren't an isolated, one-time example either. She has drawers full of erasers. Thousands upon thousands of stolen erasers. (Why erasers? Ask her. She shrugs.)
We're still not sure if she's legally responsible for theft. She's been caught and kicked out of stores, but no one has ever tried to lay charges.
She understands she's doing wrong in the sense that she's secretive and tries to hide her actions. When she tied her neighbours' doorknobs together, she did it in the middle of the night. She knew she wasn't supposed to.
However, being secretive doesn't translate into an awareness of possible repercussions. The relationship between cause and effect boggles her. Whenever she's caught, no one is more surprised than Sue that people are upset with her. Punishment makes no sense. She has no sense of guilt or remorse. As long as she can manage not to get caught, she's done nothing wrong. Actually, there are a lot of so-called normal people who feel the same way.
A week after she moved into her new room, we found out that she's been calling her neighbour from the old apartment building--the one whose doorknob she tied--on the hour every hour from midnight to 7 am. The neighbour complained. The social worker and the woman at the group home explained to Sue that this wasn't nice. (She knew it wasn't nice. She wasn't doing it to be nice. Are they crazy?) They told her that she would be punished if she didn't stop. That very night Sue was at it again.
The punishment was to take her phone away for a day. They let her have her phone again to call her mother in the nursing home in the evening. Since that's the only communication that Sue truly cares about, she wasn't penalized at all. When she got her phone back... you guessed it.
The social worker finally realized that they would have to find the neighbour's phone number and destroy it. Since Sue only moved into the room a few weeks ago, clutter hasn't been able to accumulate yet. The social worker and the woman at the group home searched Sue's drawers, her purse, her pockets, behind the curtains, between the box spring and the mattress. They never found the number. What happened was that Sue finally couldn't resist bragging how clever she was. She'd taken a picture of the phone number with her digital camera. So the picture was erased. The phone calls stopped.
The latest drama is about her cigarettes. Sue smokes one a day. She was told that she would have to leave her room to smoke and agreed that she would. But like even normal smokers of my acquaintance, she doesn't comprehend how cigarette smoke advertises itself despite even perfume and toothpaste. Those of us who don't smoke can smell it. On the hair, in clothes. You bet.
Of course, Sue denies hotly that she smokes in her room. The woman at the group home had NO RIGHT to take her cigarettes! Sue is outraged. She's been calling R and swearing at the answering machine. Bawling her head off.
R smirks. When he told the woman at the group home to expect some difficulty with Sue, she assured him she would have no problem. She was used to Down's Syndrome.
