Jessi is a woman that is sharing her story of the life of her brother Kevin. Her parents knew when they were pregnant that he was going to be born with autism. The level of his disability was not known until he was actually welcomed into the world and it was in that moment that Jessi’s life changed. Kevin was so much to handle that she began to feel like she wasn’t important to her parents anymore. She felt like her little brother was becoming the biggest problem of her life. She never hated her brother for being who he was but she felt like her parents forgot about her as they were engrossed in assisting him. Kevin was substantially developmentally behind, but it was all in a toy fish Walter that brought him out of his cocoon and to life. His first word came after that and he could not be separated from the fish that Jessi had given him. What she didn’t know was by being the creator of his breakthrough her parents would assign her to be with him all the time taking her childhood away. It was on her fifteenth birthday that she got to have a day that was all hers until Kevin’s fish gets broken and the party abruptly ends. On the way home that night, Jessi hated her brother, but it is what she does next that changes the course of her life. It is in our most angry times that we do things that we can never take back, never change and never forget. It is in her reflection of her life that we see how we can love someone, and that love turns into something it was never meant to be. But it is in the moving forward that we see Jessi heal.
PR- The Life Of Walter
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- When my mother told me she was pregnant, or at least she tried to explain it to me, “Jessi mommy is going to have a baby. Ummm mommy is going to have another you. Ummm mommy, daddy, you and little baby brother or sister.” As the story has been told to me this conversation turned into the worst game of charades that my father has ever played. He said by the time it was all said and done my mom’s belly was sore from her pointing at it so many times. I was five when we had “the talk” about the baby and eventually when my mom started getting bigger and bigger I think I understood that there was going to be another little person like me in the house. This made me happy. In my five year old mind I was going to have a new doll to play with, fun times. But about eight months into the pregnancy my parents came home, sat me down again and tried their best to explain that my little brother was going to be different. Not like super powers different. Different in a way that like…like…autistic different.