this is so true. don't know too much personally about parenting, but the
attitude of people to speak with blind persons as if they do not exist is
evidently no digfferent in any society that we may live in.
and these societies belong to the developed nations, no less...
No material in braille r accessible formats puts them and their developed
status to utter shame, i must say.
wonder if any of this will ever get better and we, as blind citizens with
all of our talents and mingling with the mainstream society will continue to
live lives as children of a lesser god?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sanjay" <ilovec...@gmail.com>
To: <accessindia@accessindia.org.in>
Sent: Friday, November 06, 2009 1:28 PM
Subject: [AI] I'm Blind--and I'm a Good Mother
Please don't blame me for its nontechnical nature. I hope many blind
parents of this group--both present and future will enjoy reading this
article.
I'm Blind--and I'm a Good Mother (By Amie Slavin. From The Guardian, U.K., ©
Aug. 8, 2009)
Hard labor, as a lifestyle choice, has more to recommend it than I could
have guessed. From those first few hours of holding Sophia, my firstborn,
curled
on my forearm learning to breastfeed, to the most recent round of
pre-breakfast "Ride a Cockhorse," bouncing two "fine ladies" on my tired
knees, I have
been a fan.
But I always knew that parenting would present different challenges for me,
compared with more mainstream mothers, because I have been blind since 1997.
The practicalities of bringing up children without eyesight are not, for the
most part, nearly as hard as you might think. Changing nappies isn't
especially
difficult if you're used to doing everything by touch. There's no mystery
about it. I don't explore fecal matter with my fingers, neither do I leave
my
baby half-cleaned. I simply use a combination of touch and smell to
determine how cleaning is progressing, and if it gets out of hand and I
begin to lose
the will to live, well, 10 minutes suffices for a bath and change of
clothes: foolproof.
Feeding is also achievable, if slightly more exciting. In the early days of
weaning, I would collect a spoonful of food with my right hand while lightly
resting my left hand on her right shoulder. In this way I could monitor the
position of her head and use my thumb to assess the in (and especially out)
flow. I didn't aim the spoon directly in but used my fingertips to detect
her mouth and its degree of openness.
Next would come the lightning transition from obliquely hovering spoonful to
precisely administered tasty mouthful without jabbing the gums, touching the
soft palate or twanging the lips or tongue.
Running my household is more complex, yet still not impossible. Recently,
for instance, while sorting laundry, I flicked the corner of a duvet cover
into
Sophia's abandoned water cup, tipping it on to the floor. I reached for the
kitchen roll and knocked over a brand new bottle of multi-surface cleaner
which,
defying its "sealed" status, sloshed its contents liberally over the
kitchen's cork tiles.
Throwing kitchen roll onto the spilled water, I set about wiping up the
surface cleaner. My wonderfully helpful (and terrifyingly valuable) new
guide dog
instantly joined in, diving first into the surface cleaner (to my panic) and
then, on my rebuff, seizing the water-soaked kitchen roll and dancing off
with it.
Flustered and swearing by now, I chased and caught the dog and paper,
sending one from the room and the other to landfill; mopped up the surface
cleaner,
recaptured my laundry and began to congratulate myself on a household crisis
averted.
Brimming with competence, I returned to make the supper I should have
started half an hour earlier. Deftly chopping three huge garlic cloves in
record time
and hurling them at the hot pan ... I missed completely!
Still, avoidance of these annoying minor disasters is possible by taking
extra time and using forethought.
I am working hard to establish good enough relationships with my daughters
that they don't get any ideas about taking advantage of my blindness. So
far,
I've come down hard on Sophia's "I've finished my food but I don't want you
to feel," (obviously unfinished food then), and her plaintive aside to her
father, "Don't let her touch my wrist because she'll make me wear long
sleeves," and it seems to be paying off. I'm hoping to instill in them the
understanding
that I am able to detect bad behavior by means more sophisticated than mere
eyesight.
I'm unlikely to win future battles with my girls along the lines of "You're
not going anywhere dressed like that." I'm actually quite at ease with the
reality
that they must be taught to respect and value themselves enough to make
their own good decisions on dress and behavior as they grow into their
teenage
years.
But the most difficult thing to deal with is not changing nappies, or
feeding and cooking, or the exhausting minefield of sightless household
management
(even the most difficult of such things are possible to overcome by letting
go of pride sufficiently to ask for help, if all else fails). No, the really
difficult and demoralizing challenge I face is other people's attitudes to
impairment in general, and to blind parents in particular.
There aren't many blind parents and we are consequently marginalized. My
health visitor tells me that while she can easily get me the free Book Start
pack
in any of 26 languages, there is no possibility of getting it in
braille/print, a combination of print and pictures with braille text that
allows blind
parents to read with sighted children. There is, in fact, no source of such
books for sale in the UK, despite the fact that they are relatively easy to
produce.
Equally shocking to me was the absence of any of the NHS pregnancy and birth
information in either braille, audio or electronic formats. I embarked on
motherhood
blind, in more than one sense.
But all of this pales into insignificance when compared with the way people
treat me. Traffic slows down to watch me walking with my guide dog and
children.
Strangers, and even friends, will seize the slightest chance to ask my
husband if I can cook and change nappies. People gawk shamelessly every time
I wipe
a nose or tie a shoelace and openly express surprise that I am not oblivious
to my children's actions when they are not physically attached to me.
As Sophia grows bigger and cleverer, the suspicion among the general public
that she is my carer is becoming almost tangible. Just last weekend, for
instance,
her adherence to the highway code prompted an admiring comment from a
passer-by. I turned to smile at the onlooker, pleased that our road safety
training
was being appreciated, only to find the words being hurriedly bitten back,
the person moving swiftly away, as they apparently drew the conclusion that
the careful road-crossing was not for my three-year-old's benefit, but for
mine.
I am regularly quizzed about my ability to feed and clean my children, the
skeptical tone of the questioning barely concealing the suspicion that it's
really
my husband who does everything. Some people will even ignore my girls' cries
for mummy, assuming that, with a mother like me, they must be meaning daddy
(which has led, on several occasions, to a gratifying clarification as their
screams intensify until they are returned to me).
The truth is that some aspects of blind parenting are a frustrating slog. It
is, of course, harder for me than it is for other mothers to do all sorts of
things. This is life as I know it, though. I am not surprised by struggle
and difficulty. They are old adversaries for anyone determined not to be
excluded
from life by a severe disability.
There are bonuses too, such as my older daughter's burgeoning vocabulary,
born of the necessity to make her meaning clear to me, and the extraordinary
gentleness
my reared-by-touch babies regard as the norm.
The only real killer is the assumption that I must be a lonely inadequate,
incapable of functional living and normal family life. Sometimes, when I
tell
people about my children in their absence, I sense a moment's pause while
they try to decide if it can be true that I have children. There is a
drawing
back, as though I may be in the grip of psychosis. The pause will end with a
querulous countering: "But you can't see. How can you have kids?", as though
I may not be aware that I am blind.
This was summed up for me recently when, escaping the mayhem of a family
Saturday at home, I slipped out for an hour's quiet shopping. Lurking
guiltily
around the designer perfumes, I overheard a woman telling her child (with no
attempt to lower her voice) how lovely it was for me to have a guide dog as,
"It's company for her."
My response to this was, I confess, somewhat crisp.
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