A Taylor Christmas

Chapter 11 - Melancholic

Jack didn't speak to us for months after they came to live with us. It was horrible to see how timid and scared that little five-year old boy acted around us. I wanted nothing more than to shower him with love and kindness, to show him what a wonderful little guy he is, but it was near impossible to break his anxious shell and get through to him.

I like to believe that I played an important part in us eventually being successful in helping him and Will open up to us and regain a certain level of trust in other human beings. Most importantly, trusting their immediate family. With a lot of patience we – all of us still being very young and completely inexperienced when it came to such challenges – managed to show them what it means to be loved and cared for. We taught them that it is more than okay to accept what they're offered. That they deserves it just as much as the rest of us do.

However, it worked a lot better with Jack than with Will.

This specific experience with our two clearly traumatized baby brothers is one of the many reasons why I chose to get a master's degree in psychology and add applied behavior analysis as a second major. The human mind and human behavior in general have always fascinated me. Not only because there is so much to discover in that field, but also because I have seen what horrific impact certain destructive, manipulative or otherwise "negative" behavior can have on people's lives and their minds. Their own, but also the lives and minds of those around them.

And Will remains an ongoing challenge. One that to this day is constantly puzzling me. I have studied behavioral sciences for almost six years now and I still feel utterly helpless at times when it comes to interacting with him. For Alex and Josh, who are trying their best to get through to him on a daily basis and raise him into adulthood without losing him along the way, it is even more difficult.

Although my brothers and I have been through plenty of bad stuff ourselves, growing up in a less than ideal home after our mother died, what we experienced is nothing compared to what Will had to endure during his first seven years in life.

From a very young age, he already more or less single-handedly took care of his little brother, who is barely two years younger than him. From the few bits and pieces I have gathered, on these rare occasions when I managed to get him to open up to me a bit, he was Jack's main caregiver from the time they were about three and five years old.

Before that, there was apparently an elderly neighbor who babysat them when their good-for-nothing mother went out, which was pretty much every day. Then, something must have happened to the old lady because, as Will sketchily remembers it, one day an ambulance came and took her away. They never saw her again after that and it was also the first day when the two little boys were left all by themselves in their mother's run-down apartment.

That day, Will was forced to leave his childhood behind and "grow up".

It still makes me want to vomit just thinking about what they went through as little kids. Yes, I was only eight when my own mother died – and Luke, Sam and Ben were even younger – but we were still an intact family back then and Dad, at least for the first couple of years after our tragic loss, kinda hung in there and tried to hold our family together.

Also, the older three boys did their best to keep things going, even if they were barely teenagers themselves. What helped us a great deal was that we were a big unity, us eight siblings. We could always count on each other to lean on if things got tough.

Will was left with nobody back then. He had to be the shoulder for Jack to lean on. A huge responsibility for anybody, let alone a young kid at the age of five.

So, objectively speaking, it is not really surprising that he is a troubled teen today, despite all the effort we put in to help him recover from his traumatic experiences as a child. Trauma which is so deeply rooted in his subconscious and reflected in his personality that, no matter how hard he might try to counteract it, it still lingers to this day.