Jenny Heath, 28, walks slowly up the townhouse stairs, wearing a pink shirt, hot pink nail polish on her fingers, and a number of bracelets and necklaces she made herself.
"Friend’s room," she says, pointing through a doorway, before showing a visitor another bedroom with hot pink walls and a comforter covered with smiling Disney princesses. "And my room."
Somewhere in the Port Union-area home is Shawna Huggett, 38, Jenny’s roommate of five years. Both women are developmentally handicapped, and this arrangement - their first home away from their families - changed both their lives for the better.
"This is their home now," said Bonnie Heath, Jenny’s mother. "It’s important to me and my daughter that she had her independence."
Heath started a group, Scarborough Residential Alternatives, just to give Jenny, who has Down syndrome, such a chance, as well as to inspire other parents of children with disabilities to set up a shared home.
On this coming Monday, July 14, afternoon, she and Shawna’s mother, Helen Huggett are inviting people from Community Living Toronto and close neighbours of the townhouse to celebrate their daughters’ five years together. "We didn’t think we’d make it this far," Heath admitted.
Before the townhouse was rented, both families had the same problems faced by many aging parents of adult disabled children, said Huggett, who is now a senior.
"So many older people have disabled ‘kids’ at home," she said.
"If the parent dies, it’s a big trauma (for the adult children), and where are they going to go?"
Huggett’s advice is to put the adult children on their own, with whatever supervision they actually need, to see what they can do. You may find they can change their sheets and do other chores when mother’s not around, she said.
"It means a bit of freedom for me," added Huggett this week. "I’m so glad I did it when I did it."
Huggett said Shawna, whose multiple handicaps are difficult to classify, was told she could come home if she didn’t like the arrangement, but "she hasn’t looked back since."
Both parents do not want their daughters in area group homes - "They don’t always get a choice of where they live and who they live with," said Heath - but say long waiting lists would delay placements for Shawna and Jenny anyway, probably for many years.
Besides their enjoyment of Michael Jackson’s music, Jenny and Shawna share a need for things in their home to be neat and on schedule. Peter Field, a third housemate, moved out after a year, but lives nearby in another shared home arrangement.
This week, Huggett and Heath interviewed another local family about adding a new person to the house.
It has been difficult for the parents, who have had no government assistance, to manage the cost of a support worker for daily visits around the dinner hour, when Shawna and Jenny require some supervision and help.
The province’s Liberal government, however, is preparing to pass a budget containing new funds for persons with disabilities, which may mean support for the shared home is finally possible, Heath said.
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