Albert saw his parents watching him. He jumped from the bed and ran to us. “Mommy, Daddy! Albert did bad wrong. Albert did bad wrong.” Bad wrong was Albert’s newest catch-phrase. He used it whenever he saw us. Apparently, Albert had decided that his sentence at the institution was the result of his wrongdoing. And he was right.

Our visits grew less frequent. Albert aged physically. He grew into something of a hulk. A mostly silent giant who looked like neither me nor Rachel. At one point, there was talk of a group home for Albert. As Mrs. Jones described it, a group home is a noninstitutional setting for those with developmental disabilities similar to Albert’s. A group home is staffed with workers called houseparents. Living in a group home was apparently a great advantage. The list of applicants was long, but Albert was considered a prime candidate. The group home would offer something that Albert would find at no institution no matter how advanced its therapies. It would offer him normalization. Mrs. Jones used this word- normalization -in our meetings. Over and over, she repeated the word as though it obtained some magical quality when spoken aloud. Normalization. Normalization. Normalization. Your son is now normal.

Or perhaps the magic the word wove was on Rachel and me. With a wave of the bureaucratic wand, your son no longer lives in a barren institution. You are now free from guilt. Please return to your former lives. Your son now lives in a normal home, just like you. You can visit him there, just as you would visit a son who was normal. You can return to your normal lives. Everything is normal now.

A month before he was to move to the group home, Albert killed his suitemate, Jack, in a dispute over a pair of socks. We never heard the word normalization again. Albert did move, however.