Life Lessons on Independent Living: Housing and Supports

Our ultimate goal is to have all of our children move on and live independently. So of course with Brian, as with everything, there's a little extra work to all of that. So we started, my husband and I, looking early on with the parents that we became friends with that had children with disabilities. Figuring out, and literally this is what you do, who does my kid get along with? Not only that, who do we get along with? Because you're going to have a responsibility in this too. So we were looking at another friend, whose name also happened to be Mark, but as the boys grew up, their personalities really conflicted. And so that did not turn out to be very good for us. But we found another parent and we said, alright, how are we going to make it so that they can live independently? At the time, neither one of them qualified for a core waiver, mainly because we just had too many natural supports built around. So we said, how do we get them out? How do we support them? They both had Medicaid personal care. And we said, well what kind of supports do they need? Well basically these two young men, because we had been risk taking with them early on and planning for them to move out, they really just needed the amount of support that they'd get from Medicaid personal care. So Carla and I came together, that's Mark's mother, and we basically just said, this is what they need to survive, we're all around, everybody drops in periodically, and there they are. So we built toward that. And we worked on getting these boys moved out. They didn't move out until they were 23. We started working on it at about 20. I mean the real push for it. And really working on the skills that would get them out. Having them show to us that they had acquired the skills necessary to leave the house. So they've been out living on their own for two years. We started in an apartment with the boys that was at the other end of town, so about 12-15 minutes away. It was a nice apartment, two bedroom, we met the people next door, you know, again, 10,000 eyes. 10,000 eyes and risks. The 10,000 eyes are probably the most important to let us know if something came up, rehearse with the boys what to do, if the fire alarm went off, all those basic things. They were right next to Kmart and the bus stop, so they were in a really good spot. They did have a little problem though. Their toilet broke and it flooded the bottom apartment. They were on the second floor. And so we decided after that that we would really like them closer to the neighborhood that Brian had grown up in and that Mark had gone to school in. So we started looking for a place closer to our home. About three months after the flooding, we found a duplex just up the street. It's about a block and a half from me. It's about half a mile from Carla's sister and her other son lives about a mile away. And my two boys also live within two or three blocks of the house. So we have the boys centrally located with all their natural supports, actually within walking distance. We try and get out and do as much as we can. Shopping, we go do the shopping stuff, we go to games when we can, baseball games, we like going on walks. We do a lot. He lives right up the street so it's really easy. I expect that he will work and live and enjoy his community for the rest of his life and be very, very happy doing it.