Well, if anyone were actually reading this, which isn’t going to happen until I tell anyone about it, “where have I been” might seem to refer to my lack of posting for a while. Actually, it’s more about how did I miss a precious nugget of popular culture. I don’t know if it really is all that popular. But I was lying in bed in my usual sleepless state when, at about 3AM I found myself humming Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” and googled it because I couldn’t remember all the words. And discovered that this song is now the theme song for a TV program “Weeds” and that in this context it has been recorded by a variety of performers in a variety of styles. My favorite is the one by Angelique Kidjo.
It’s a natural for this, but how ironic that it took a commercial TV show to make it happen. What *would* Malvina be thinking?
Where Have I been?
Sex and the Single Hamburger
I had decided I wasn’t going to write about dating on this blog for the general purposes of protecting my own privacy. And if someone else ever actually reads this – well – there are enough blogs one can read to follow someone else’s failed love life and I don’t mean to add to them.
But I do think the issue of dating is important for single parents to at least mention. And especially as it touches on adoptive parenting, parenting teens, etc. So I may write about it from time to time.
I heard an interview on NPR a while ago by a guy who wrote a book about his experiences as a single father raising a couple of kids alone oh, I guess I will put aside my laziness and look it up.
Well, I started to do that and became mesmerized by all the books on the topic”how not to stay single” Which is also a book title by Nita Tucker which is quite useful, at least I hope it is.
But back to my point – and I guess I need to add ADD as a personal defining adjective – the author was talking about dating and said something I liked about parenting in your life as opposed to stepping out of your life to parent.
When I’m with other single adoptive parents I sometimes feel like I’m in a new movie called Stepford Moms.” Everybody is happy, nobody is wishing for a partner, let’s all agree how much easier it is to be the only parent, the one who makes the rules, nobody for the kids to go behind your back to, etc. etc. Rah Rah.
I personally really want a partner, middle aged mother that I am. Maybe putting it out here, one more place, will be that much more energy out into the universe.
And all of that is leading up to what I hope was this year’s emotional low this week. And not wanting to write anything. Having spent way too much time the past six weeks or so writing my fingers off to someone I met on-line. And foolishly let into my heart. Yeah, a modern cliche. Well, that one is over. Just for the emotional thrill of it, I did the bulk of it during my hardest month – the one that 19 years ago ended in the death of my partner, which this year fell on Thanksgiving.
And I’m working on how not to mourn the loss of something that never was. I got one line out of it that is a keeper. How to know when to run for the nearest exit and slam it behind you, bolted and padlocked – The context – she is worrying about whether it’s OK to have casual sex (not discussing it with me, really, and it certainly didn’t feel like a casual discussion to me), stressing over how it fit with her personal moral compass:
“It’s a hunger. I don’t know why it’s a problem for me – when I’m hungry I eat. But I can choose to eat good food or I can choose McDonald’s”.
Ronalda McDonald, here, signing off for the night.
Baltimore
The hardest part of being in all these parts of the US is that I can facilitate anything I need to do for work by spending money which gets reimbursed, but all the hard things about getting around as a blind person make it hard to actually spend time in a place and have fun with the travel. I’d say right now, the greatest benefit is time away from my kids to help me get perspective and have someone else make my bed and provide me with clean towels.
I’m trying to do at least one thing in each city I visit. And without access to all the “what to do here” brochures and maps put out for other visitors. There is the Internet but sometimes I find it takes so long to get at things that interest me that it’s too late to do them. It’s kind of like the menus – I want to know what my choices are and to get anywhere, I need to ask for what I want without getting to know the selection.
A decade ago I came up with a personal formula for what to ask about – anything to do on or near a body of water, riding any unique forms of transportation, and good local music.
In Baltimore, with absolutely no time to plan, I left work Thursday and headed for the body of water I knew about – the Iner Harbor. It must have taken me a half hour to go the two or three blocks from the workplace to the harbor via an overpass. Overpass sounds simple – no streets to cross, a defined area that would be easy to stay on. And it wasn’t at all and I was possibly the only person on it most of that time. I think almost a decade of guide dog use has emboldened me to not worry about such unpopulated areas, but I imagine my safety wasn’t well ensured along that route. I do act as if I have an 85 pound German Sheherd at my side and a blind lady with just her cane is just not as formidable.
That overpass was not neat and defined. It was spread out and led to hotels and other establishments, but without any sort of defined walkways and without the traffic and pedestrian noise that are so valuable for direction. . I very much missed the organized world below full of streets and sidewalks.
Skipping all the tedious details of that venture, I finally got to a place where I asked the one person who was around and he led me to a stairway he assured me went down to the harbor area and when he asked what I was particularly looking for and I replied that I was there on work and had an evening to be a tourist, he fell in step beside me and started pointing out things and telling me about Baltimore and the harbor area.
I know, it could have been a not great idea to hang out with a stranger, but in the past those impromptu stranger connections have often been the best part of a trip. And this was no Exception. Wiliam, who is homeless and hopefully temporarily so was a most gracious guide for the evening.He spent a lot of time with me in the big science museum there, a place I wouldn’t have even thought to walk into on my own, and made sure I got to every exhibit and read me anything I wanted. Best part of the museum – an electric harp with laser beams instead of strings. You could press a button and change the sounds it produced from a variety of western music, something probably Japanese with drums, and a host more straight from whatever the latest choices are in the standard electronic keyboard . You played the thing by running your hands through the beams. It was beautiful and I wouldn’t have ben surprised to learn I’d been playing it a half hour or more. Williwm insisted we had to find someone to tell me where you could buy one but, as I suspected, at a mere $16,000 it is way out of my price range.
Altogether, the place, the company and resulting philosophical discussions and the beautiful weather that I lucked into made for a lovely evening.
Not quite Home Away From Home
I often feel like some of the things that are hard for me as a blind person just aren’t as hard for other blind people. Emotionally hard, that is. O Or that I seem to have higher expectations than others.
One of those areas is hotel rooms. This week it was Baltimore and I stayed in the Marriott Residence Inn – a place more oriented to the long-term stay guest. I like those places because you get a full kitchen area and more extras. This one included free Internet access and what basically amounted to free breakfast and some dinner food along with that. And better quality room coffee than I’m used to. I had checked as I usually do for windows that open and was told that this one also had that feature. I’m not sure the windows really did, I couldn’t open them, but it was an old building and there was air leaking in around the windows and I didn’t have the problem of feeling loggy from the recycled indoor air.
And I had all the issues of access to what is in my room that I usually do in hotels. I will often have someone come up to the room with me and spend as much time as I can worm out of them going over things in the room – which coffee is regular versus the decaf I never drink, how do I work the thermostat, the TV remote, what are all the buttons on the phone, what little bottles came in my bathroom, how do I make an Internet connection, and what does all the print scattered around my room in the form of cards and brochures actually say. If I have the patience and get the time I will have the person go through the spiral bound directory of services including room service menus and how to work the voice mail. I will write all this down in a notetaker I have with speech output. I have hundreds of files with notes on thermostat settings from hotels around the country that I will never be able to locate again if I go back somewhere, but I seem to never get around to deleting all that or perhaps I just resist getting rid of something I worked hard for. Really, I should be getting emergency evacuation information and I never bother with that. But I shouldn’t have to, I think. It should just be there. The other piece I never get which has become impossible is all the “in-room entertainment”. You could once call down to the front desk and have them read a list of movies and make your own choices. Now it is all inaccessible menus on the TV along with all the other choices I’m told Ihave that I really don’t. Even for the things I just mentioned, some effort is usually made to push me not to ask but rather “to just call the front desk when you need something”. And I always tip for that help. I do wish I could come up with a gracious way to say “if you do what I need I will tip more.”
I’ve done a lot of circular thinking in my mind – mostly imaginary conversations around the question of why it isn’t enough to have people come to my room to help me. I just can’t imagine it and I finally realized it just doesn’t work. Say, I’m cold. I call downstairs to have someone come up and turn up the heat. By the time they show up a half hour later I’m not cold any more. But I also had to stay dressed, couldn’t take a shower, make a phone call unless it could be interrupted easily, or just go out while I’m waiting for them. Or I do and my thermostat stays put. If I add everything I might want to do in a hotel room and leave myself waiting for others to help, I’d just spend all my time sitting and waiting. I would become the annoying guest all the staff avoid. Or I would be paying as much in tips for all that help as I did for the room. I would have no privacy.
I have a bad memory. There is a general assumption that blind people have good memories – something our brains do naturally to compensate for lack of eyesight. Well, not so, and some do and some don’t. Some blind people do demonstrate remarkable memory skills. I imagine that someone who naturally has a good memory will use those skills more than their sighted neighbor, having to compensate for what is not really lack of eyesight but living as a blind person in a community where the sighted majority has designed the environment for themselves and other sighted people. And because they are often in situations where their memories are on public display, they get noticed.
Whatever the case, I have poor short term memory and altogether no ability to process a restaurant menu read out loud. The best thing I have figured out to do is take notes while it is being read. Which sometimes amounts to having to transcribe my own menu. But that is when it is read and most of the time, I don’t get menus read. I get someone asking me what I want, my response that I want to hear what is on the menu that is available to everyone else, their insistence that it is to long and i need to tell them what I want, my insistence that I can’t know what I want until Iknow my choices, etc. etc. and maybe I get told a few items on a long menu if I haven’t given up first, only to hear the person at the next table ordering something I would have much preferred. And often I pay too much for it because it is even harder to get people to read prices and I often just give up. Considering how hoard this is and that I really almost never get a menu read, it is hard to believe that all the assertions that we don’t need access built in because we can just get people coming to our rooms to give it to us is kind of bogus. Because they don’t ever totally give it to us, we get bits and pieces, depending on what someone else feels like giving us on a particular day.
Lack of access also compromises the security we are supposedly getting in hotel rooms. Ihave a hard time finding out my room number because they are told to never say it out loud, but I am told to have the hole staff coming and going from my room at any hour. I was recently in a hotel – the Marriott in Oakland California, where the person sent up to my room had me pressed into a corner with his arms around me. when I pushed him away he told me he was stopping me from walking into the wall. I spent that whole stay unable to sleep properly and generally freaked out while in my room and knew I couldn’t report it because it is societally acceptable to have your hands on any part of a blind person’s body and it is assumed that anything that is done to us is in the name of help. And maybe it is, but from the inside of this woman’s body, it is still a violation and the fact that I can never prevent it and am generally told I’m not supposed to mind means I don’t get the security others do. anytime I can do something without having to call for help, is one more time I don’t have to wonder what one more person is going to do to me and how to avoid it.
So, this week I just didn’t have the energy. I didn’t want someone coming up to my room. Ihad a lot to finish before I left and left late – the luxury I got from a trip to Baltimore where I could take Amtrak and not a pre-scheduled flight. So I got in, went up to my room, and enjoyed my time alone. But I never heard what was in my room. The coffee came in large pouches I was able to ID by color – one very light and one very dark, and after a pot of the dark pouch I knew it had as much caffeine as I wanted in it. I put the pouch of popcorn in the microwave and pushed on the screen and it turned on. In past years I carried wicky stix (not sure of spelling) and a small scissor with me to put temporary circles around buttons on such flat screen panels – after having that person from the hotel help me out with what was where. This time, I do believe that microwave was also a convection oven and it’s a miracle all I got was microwave when I randomly pressed on the screen, but I made out OK. I unplugged the radio alarm so it wouldn’t go off on me in the middle of the night because I couldn’t see the settings, and skipped the complimentary shampoo and stuff. And was OK, but I’d also known what to ask at the front desk to find out about breakfast and discover that I would also get dinner food downstairs – something I was probably told about on one of those pieces of paper in the room. I piled up my dirty dishes but found no dish soap and couldn’t figure out how to run the dishwasher and just left it. In a place I’d stayed in before, they ran it for you each day while you were out and they didn’t here the first day and didn’t leave fresh dish cloths or towels and I was weighing out what dishes I would need to last the week and then they ran it the second day -information that was probably also on a card in my room. And if there were other services in the rooms I just missed them. Since the portable radio I carry with me doesn’t really do that great a job, it’s one more annoyance that I can’t just use the radio in the room, but I will inevitably set it for 3 AM while Iam figuring it out, not know it, and wake up to an unknown and annoying beeping noise in the middle of the night. So I skip it. I accidently discovered I was right across the hall from the exercise room but never went in because I just didn’t want to deal with equipment with inaccessible controls. And with no restaurant or room service I didn’t miss that. but before I left I remembered another such property where there were features like being able to leave a shopping list in your room each day and they would pick things up for you. If I’d stayed there longer I would have sorely missed knowing my options and often those options are things you would never think to ask. And I just generally feel irked that 19 years after the ADA supposedly made me an equal citizen and mandated access to all this sort of thing, I don’t get it and nobody is working out how I can.
And this morning, I was poking around reading the blogs I enjoy and often don’t have time for on a daily basis, and found that Blind Confidential, my favorite blind person blog has a piece where Blind Christian bemoans the same lack of hotel room access in a series he is calling Eating an Elephaint. And I feel quite validated. He also managed to give a small handful of constructive suggestions rather than my approach which is to bemoan grievances, but there it is. Up there with some of my other difficult issues like grocery and clothing shopping, menus in restaurants, and the generally poor state of public transit in most of the US. So maybe I will write more about all of that. And maybe do a nice neat addition to that list of how to make it better. If I get the time.
Feel the Heat
All the kids are out partying and this old maid is home with the animals. And the cat is in heat. It is D#1’s cat which I rarely see since she lives in D#1’s room and associates me with the dog which she usually hides from. When D#1 first brought home this cat she told me it wasn’t spayed. And I told her it needed to be and she did go out and buy the carrier that the free spaying van requires. And then it didn’t go into heat. For months it didn’t go into heat and I assumed one of two things – it had been spayed and she just hadn’t been told because the chain of information around the cat was rather flimsy, or that it hadn’t been spayed but had some kind of hormonal problem and wasn’t going into heat. Well, now it is in heat and I am wondering if the real problem is the cat’s age. D#1 had said she was about five years old, but D#1 is very bad with time and numbers. I didn’t think she was *that* bad, but who knows.
This is the second time the cat has gone into heat. The first time was, I thought, the last. I had assumed that her girlfriend or D#2 would have made sure she took care of that one since they sleep closer to the cat and have to hear it all the time. But now they are all out and it is creeping closer and closer to my room and yowling.
D#1 had a puppy for six months During which we had horrible conflicts over what “responsible” meant until she did realize that if I wasn’t willing to take care of the pup, she couldn’t either and we found it a new home. I spent sleepless nights listening to the puppy barking. D#1 would come home and, to my complaints, reply “you should have told her to sit.” You know, sitting fixes everything. Up till now she has been pretty responsible for the cat but, well, I will try hard not to think “here we go again” and harder to not start worrying about what will happen when the baby comes in January.
I saw an article today in my in-box by a mother who “abandoned” her son in order to get him mental health care. Which reminded me too much of the awful predicament of another blogging parent I’d read last month. I have felt a bit squeamish up till now about participating in discussion of adoption and mental health issues. Because it is so common for people who find out you are adopting out of foster care to ask why you’d want to take “those kids” with “all those problems.” And I know that I am adopting the young people I want to parent just because these are the young people I want to parent. And that my life is richer for having them in it, despite the sometimes frustrating difficulties. And kids don’t usually end up in the foster system for anything about them but because of their parents problems, so it doesn’t seem fair to fit them into neat little categories. And because kids are in a system that is focused on “treatment”, so all of them have files that contain lists of their many disorders, and that many of these so-called disorders are normal reactions to an abnormal situation. What I like to call Failure to Thrive in the Foster Care System Disorder or FTTFCSD. .
The harsh reality, however, is that most kids in the system do have significant mental health problems. Whatever their parents did to them to get them removed certainly had an impact and sometimes a permanent one. Pre-natal drug and alcohol use can result in a variety of permanent disabilities, including damage to one’s brain. My daughters both have ADHD as do I, but mine is likely the old-fashioned inherited characteristic and theirs is most likely a result of prenatal crack exposure. And that is just the beginning. The best word I’ve heard lately that seems appropriate is “traumatized”. These are traumatized kids. I was also a traumatized kid, I know about these things and the lifelong impact that results from what you do to a baby or child.
And whatever you don’t enter the system with, it gives you. Some kids do enter the system coming out of reasonably adequate or sometimes good homes. Children may have had a parent who was not caring for them and perhaps not able to care for them according to certain standards, but where they were nonetheless loved and nurtured. Or where they were basically OK and had other people in their lives who made their lives work. One young woman I know was removed at age 13 from what had been a good home for her because of abuse by a father against a sister only to be placed in the homes of people who really did beat and rape her. Many kids like her suffer abuse in the system and at the hands of foster parents that is much worse than what happened in the homes they were removed from. And we know that just not having a permanent home or parents, being bounced from place to place with all one’s connections in the world ripped up over and over is very damaging. So, what we have is a system for taking kids who have been through hell and putting them through more hell. Of course they have psychiatric problems.
One of my daughters does have significant mental health issues. And I don’t think she is getting appropriate help for them. The other does not although she had just as long a list of disorders in her files. She might have earlier in her life, I am not qualified to say, but all she has now besides the ADHD are delays resulting from her life in the system and lack of education and experience. Both are survivors – when you take kids when they are already in their teens, the ones you meet are the ones who have survived and managed fairly successfully in the world.
All that said, it’s been heartbreaking for me to read the stories of really good adoptive parents, doing the work of parenting the most traumatized of our children, who are unable to get the help they need to properly care for these kids and instead are often punished for it. The public does not generally know that parents sometimes have to legally abandon their children and face charges of neglect to get them the level of care that they need and that will keep them from harming other children in their homes or their parents.
When I was taking required parenting classes, I did them with an organization that specifically looks for permanent homes for “tweens” and teens. We were told over and over that the one thing you never do is tell your kids they no longer have a home if they do specific behaviors. Because the critical thing we have to offer is permanency, someone who has a lifelong commitment to them. That telling them they have a home and then abandoning them back to the system is the worst thing we could do to them. We were told that we need to think like parents, not foster parents. If a foster parent has a child go to jail or end up in a hospital or residential placement, that connection is severed. If a parent has a child go to jail, they have a child in jail. If they have a child in a residential facility, that is still their child in the residential facility.
Which is all well and good, but it seems we are not giving parents this opportunity. In order to get their children into appropriate care, parents are looking at no choice besides legally dissolving their relationship to their children, or legally abandoning them. This is very very bad and we need to change this if some of our most traumatized children are to have good families and a shot at the best possible future.
Voting
Funny that I sat down to blog on Election Day and didn’t have much to say. After having written my fingers off earlier about my own voting problems. That was to have been the big day for accessible voting. New York city finally complying with the Help America to Vote Act (HAVA) requirements on accessible voting. Well, I was already pessimistic.
The standard method of voting for those of us who cannot read the print ballots has been to have two election workers help us vote – one from each of the parties. Which implies there are only two parties. The implication is that with a Democrat and a Republican standing there, neither one can get away with messing with our votes. I guess. It isn’t secret and certainly isn’t neutral.
I’ve done my best throughout the years to give myself that secret ballot. At the point where I could still see the ballot if I could get my face an inch or so away from it, I would bring a chair into the booths with me to stand on and contort my body around to get my face that inch away from everything I needed to read. In California where I ran into the hole punch cards with the famous hanging chads I probably ruined a voting book bending it so I could work out where to punch my own holes. In between there was Minneapolis where I lived three years and had no choices, – the ballots were marked with special pens on paper ballots I just couldn’t read at all. There I had to fight for the right not to vote out loud in the middle of a crowded room. All there were counters with privacy dividers and I dragged my two poll workers, usually rather old women, all over the building looking for a room where we could go in and at least I’d only have to share my vote with the two of them. In one election I found the room only to have a group of partying people enter halfway through my voting.
That was the time that I decided not to vote at all if I couldn’t have a secret ballot. I had been having a love affair with the Minnesota caucus system and had gotten myself made alternate to the Democratic convention. And I cast my vote realizing that it wasn’t the Democratic pole worker I felt was protecting my vote – I felt like I couldn’t vote the way I usually did – finding a third party I liked something about for any position where either there was a shoo-in candidate or nobody else I particularly liked. Because I would be publicly disloyal to the party I professed to represent.
Back in New York City with good old fashioned levers, I worked out a system where I’d make up a list of where everything was supposed to be on the ballot, have anyone go into the booth with me just to make sure i had the layout correct, and then send them out and vote counting levers and spaces. It takes a long time that way, and I am usually in the booth with poll workers outside calling in “are you OK, dear?” every minute or so, causing me to lose count and have to start again in tricky places. But it worked and I did it.
I think that the implication of this sort of thing is really negative beyond the inconvenience or even frustration. Because there is so much stock set on the importance of secret ballots. and if it’s so important then what does it mean to be constantly reminded you are not one of the people it’s important for. that is part of the growing anger I’ve been feeling about what it means to be blind in America. It means saying “we” all the while excluding yourself and having others say “us” all the time excluding you. It means that everyone assumes you will be saying “except me” in your head and not be bothered by it. “of course you can’t expect us to do everything different just for you?” It means hearing this creeping language of specialness – once used specifically to describe accommodations in education, then applied to the kids getting those accommodations and now to disabled adults. We are now “the special people.” If our needs were so darn special people wouldn’t have to go to court to force them to be met.
Sometime last year I went to a demonstration of what I thought were going to be the accessible voting machines. I went already knowing that “accessible to all” wasn’t true – that among others, deaf-blind people who need braille were going to be ignored. Asmall enough group, not worth worrying about. Not that anyone said that in so many words, but “Oh, they’ll just get someone to help them” I was told by someone in a major blindness organization who was working on the accessible voting issue. . Where they were going to get that someone wasn’t clear – they were under the assumption that deaf-blind people are entitled to something like the interveners deaf-blind people in Canada use – people who can act as guides and interpreters. But they are not. And that person slid away without answering my next question – why it should be important for blind people to have secret ballots if the principle still didn’t include everyone. If anything, it is easier for a hearing-blind person to “get someone” to read a ballot and mark it for them than it is for a deaf-blind person. When I mentioned the problem to a so-called cross-disability group where people were working on HAVA, I was told that just because a technology didn’t exist yet (meaning braille displays) shouldn’t prevent access for the rest of us. Well, first of all, there are developing countries where blind people vote by use of plain cheap technologically unsophisticated and non-polluting hard copy braille. The kind produced by pushing a metal stylus through sheets of paper. But even on the technology front, there have been refreshable braille computer displays since computers were first accessed through terminals and long before the development of the speech output that is so much more commonly used today by the majority of blind people. The thing is, they are expensive. and perhaps people were afraid that one more expense would shut the project down altogether. I just don’t know.
But I am not deaf. I have a minor hearing impairment. I don’t pretend it is nothing, but if I can carry on a conversation with another person in a very noisy room and hear everything they say, well, that is about where it is. I may lean a little closer, turn my better left ear towards the speaker, but I can hear them. I do, however have more problems with lower pitches, the opposite of the more common pattern. I had one student in a class whose voice was pitched right in my most problematic area and I just couldn’t’ tell what he was saying to me. I felt badly about that one. I also have ADHD and perhaps that is the reason I can’t listen to very slow speech and do anything useful with it. If it is too slow I can’t keep track of what was said before and string the words together in my mind. the New York city Metro Card machines have speech that is set in that very low range at a very slow non-adjustable rate and the last time I tried to use them was the time I wasted $38 on a special weekly bus pass instead of the monthly card I wanted to buy.
So, the last time I went to a voting machine demo, I sat down, put on my headset, and was greeted by a voice very much like the Metro Card voice. Too deep and too slow for me to process in any useful way. I was told there were adjustments that could be made but only after the ballot is fed into the machine and so these features couldn’t be part of the demo. I had other concerns, like why they were using synthesized speech instead of the more human quality of digitize speech so common today. I personally don’t like digitized speech so much, but there are many who do have problems with synthesized speech, among them large numbers of newly visually impaired seniors who may also have hearing impairments.
I did go in today expecting that awful low slow speech and was pleasantly surprised that the machine did use digitized speech. The only problem was that, on this machine that was supposed to also have been for hearing impaired people, the highest volume setting was too quiet for me to fully get the instructions. The poll worker who was helping me with this was a lovely woman but the process was next to useless. Fortunately, I stopped before we even fed the ballot in and I was able to go back to my original booth area and vote the tedious but workable way I have for the past 6-8 years with the help of that very lovely poll worker who spent considerable time helping me copy out the ballot. That was just too bad. Maybe next time.
Making the Laundry List
I don’t know how much it was noticed, but disabled people made the laundry list in this amazing presidential acceptance speech. I notice all the time, how that list of inclusion just misses us. Well, we are there in the other categories – black and white, male and female, gay and straight, etc. But there we were. At a time when we are celebrating perhaps the greatest overturning of images, of who America is, “disabled and non-disabled” made the list.
The New Face of America
So, I think Obama is president. Daughter #2 is watching some sort of garbage on TV and I think Daughter #1 is sleeping – since I have too go through Daughter#2’s room to visit with her, I don’t as often. I am curled up in my room with NPR. Do we need a living room? If we had one would we all be sitting around watching election returns together? I wish we had that sort of family time. I wonder if there is something I can do to still make it happen or if it just is not who we are. I’m a little sad about that.
D#2 was really into voting. D#1 didn’t – she said she didn’t have a reason to vote for either one so she thought it was only fair to just not vote. I am feeling really happy that we finally have someone in office who might just want this country to look a bit like I want it to look. And very pleased to have a black president. I don’t know what it will mean for my African American daughters, but I hope there is some sort of attitudinal shift that this is part of. D#1 has a lot of internalized racism that she readily expresses. this has just got to do *something* positive.
The Week in Review
I was in Nashville for four days this week, and came back Thursday night. I left home not wanting to leave, found myself not wanting to come back, and now wishing I never had to leave again.
One of the hardest parts of travel for work is that there is pressure from both within and without to be a tourist. I had my best time in any city about ten years ago in Nashville. I was there with a colleague, we stayed downtown, and spent every night out listening to some kind of music, from a small smoky jazz club to glitsy flashy large and loud country music to the very serious, no-talking singer/songwriter venue. I have such vivid memories of that two-week period during which 17–year cicadas were emerging from their sleeping places. . At first I thought I was hearing lawn sprinklers, the singing noise that grew louder every day until they mated and started falling out of the sky as they died. I remember the lushness of the greenery in the mountains where we went on a weekend when someone rented a car. And I remember the fun local people we worked with, the really nice atmosphere I enjoyed every day.
The work I am doing now is training visually impaired employees of the federal government on the assistive technology they need to do their jobs. Ten years ago the IRS switched from DOS to Windows and all their blind employees got about two weeks of one-on-one training to learn the new system. I was one of about a couple of dozen trainers who went around the country for six months doing that training.
It is harder being out there alone. I get called in when a new visually impaired employee starts work, when someone gets a new piece of equipment they need training on, or occasionally when an existing employee loses vision and needs to re-learn the job they already do. Most nights I go back to my hotel, take off my shoes, check my email and try to get up the energy to go out to dinner. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just take a walk. Sometimes I do a tourist thing or go find some good local music. But it’s life, it’s in the middle of the rest of my life, and sometimes, like this past week, I just go back to the hotel, order room service or delivery, plug in my computer and take care of annoying work. I am still working on my 2007 expenses and tax return.
One night in Nashville I got a call from a concerned friend back home who went by my house and reported the young people were smoking. I’m allergic to the smoke and in recent years that has resulted in related asthma attacks. There have been several occasions when I came home and had to leave and take out a hotel room that night because the air in my apartment has been too permeated by the smoke. They know not to do it. The newest one has never been around when I vacated or went to the emergency room, but she has her own asthma problems and knows what it’s like. I never get told it actually happened, I always get some line about smoke coming in the windows or something. So I still don’t know as they are adamant nobody was smoking and he was clear something strong and smoky was going on. But I was upset enough ahead of time that they did a decent job of airing it out. Or something.
But at that point I was about to overnight mail my notice to the landlord which I then didn’t do. I was not about to go look for a nicer apartment if they couldn’t respect my need to breathe in the one we had. After I got home I offered them the option – I could walk the notice to the landlord’s office in person or we could wait another month and they somberly agreed they wanted to wait. I don’t even know why. I didn’t ask. I went to bed and crashed.
That is the other hard part of the travel. How to integrate picking up life when I get back. Unlike the last time, I can throw things into my suitcase now in half an hour or less. ten years ago I would be up all night packing, no matter how long or short a period of time I’d be away for. But I still crash when I get home, regardless of whether I had work that day and got home really late or whether it was just a leisurely travel day. And then the next day I want to be on vacation, not running around doing daily life work.
This time it was taken care of for me. The worker from the foster agency was coming to certify my home Friday at noon for Daughter#2, as I’ll call her, while I figure out names and anonymity. Fortunately they all took it seriously and the house was basically clean and neat when I got back. Nice to come home to that!
Since I hadn’t planned on Daughter#2, she is in the living room. It is off a hallway and you have to go through it to get to #1daughter’s room, but not to get to my room, the kitchen, or the bathroom. And it has windows. So it basically fulfills all the criteria the system has for rooms that are acceptable for foster kids. It doesn’t have an actual door in the doorway, but the whole of the room that she is using is out of line of sight of the doorway. And she is sleeping on a sofa-bed but sleeps on it as a sofa, not pulled out. The door and the bed were, I had thought, the two problems we might have to fix. She said she’d prefer not to get a bed until we moved and found out how much space there was. But I’d told the foster care people I’d be happy to buy a bed. I also told them I’d be happy to put up whatever kind of door they deemed acceptable. I hadn’t expected the guy walking through to tell me we didn’t have enough room. I told him we were planning to move, and his comment was, “you need a living room:.
Well, living rooms are nice. But we live in Manhattan. Middle class people in Manhattan are often raising kids in studio and one bedroom apartments with room dividers. Many people do not have living rooms. Despite what I said before about needing that new apartment, we *want* that new apartment, but many people make this sort of space work out of necessity. We have a small but nice Eat in Kitchen where we can spend time together without being in anyone’s bedroom. And all of New York City outside our front door.
So, I’m nervous. If it is all approved, we get a stipend check out of the system for Daughter#2 which will help us fund that new apartment. Since New York is one of the few states that allow kids to stay in the system till they turn 21, we will have that check for a while. I prefer to do legal adoption and she prefers to wait and age out of the system, but if we do legal adoption the check converts to an adoption subsidy till she turns 21. And we theoretically should have been getting it since the day she moved in September, but, even though she is here and the agency is getting money for her, and I’m already a certified foster parent for them and the apartment is certified for more than one kid, they don’t seem to plan to give it to us until the apartment is certified for her, specifically. Now I find out that my own medical exam that I was OK waiting on till December, now has to also be done before that certification. Which they couldn’t have told me sooner either. Theoretically, since Daughter#1 also opted to defer legal adoption until she aged out, we could lose her check if they don’t certify the apartment, livingroomless as we are.
I could be worrying for nothing. And personally I’d rather ditch the system and ditch the checks than be tied to this. We could get a new larger apartment and rent a room or two to a student or two. And I’m making enough for us to get by if not live in style. But since the girls want what they can get out of the system that served them so poorly their whole lives, well, I’m in it but not very happily.
What I am most afraid of is the never-ending running in circles without answers and without anyone at the agency doing their job properly that happened when Daughter#1 first came to me. My attitude had changed in recent times and I basically decided to ignore the agency altogether, except for doing the things they specifically require to certify the apartment. I don’t ask anything from them and don’t offer anything. And live my life the way I need to without worrying if it fits in with their regs or not. But I don’t want to put Daughter#2 in the position of having to make a decision to stay here if I’m not certified or leave to maintain her own status in the system.
Living In A Shoebox
I first posted this in my first version of this blog on October 24, 2008
I was walking home from the subway today thinking about my housing problem. About two months ago I was on the fence as to whether we should leave our two bedroom apartment in the Morningside Heights area of New York City and move to someplace for less money and more room before my 20-year-old daughters baby comes in January. three weeks ago I asked the young woman who had crashed on our living room sofa after losing a potential home to join our family. Two days ago, as I was talking about how no more young people are coming into this house until the baby is ready to walk, my daughter’s girlfriend told me she had been kicked out of her home with no money and no place to go. And yes, I said “yes”.
So, my nerves have been on edge because I am perfectly happy about them all, but it’s a small apartment and growing smaller. I am retiring a guide dog and hoping she will be able to stay with us which means by the time my grandbaby is born or I get my next guide dog, whichever comes sooner, our household will have swelled to four adults, two large dogs, a baby and a cat. We won’t even mention my daughter’s recent report of efforts to allow said cat to breed – the one we thought had already been neutered but which went into heat recently.
Almost at my front door and not knowing if I’d have three square feet to turn around in after entering, the nursery rhyme about the old woman with too many children who lived in a shoe popped into my head. I just looked it up and it is not terribly inspiring:
There was an old woman,
Who lived in a shoe;
She had so many children,
She didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth,
Without any bread;
She whipped them all soundly,
And sent them to bed.
Well, not the solution as to the best way to treat anyone, never mind youth who spent too much of their lives in our foster care system.
the more humane and boring answer is to give notice and pray. Anyone reading this can pray for us to find a great large apartment we can afford within ten minutes by subway from where we are now. And while you are at it – four bedrooms, a really large living room, laundry in the building, elevator or ground floor, near a good park and a nice place by the river, and maybe a yard, patio, or access to the roof. And a nice honest landlord. Yeah, right.
Why a Blind Traveler?
I am not sure yet what this blog will be about. You might wonder at the title reading my first posts. Well, I am, in fact, blind and I conceived this blog some months ago when, after seven stationary years, I resumed a level of travel for work that would entitle me to call myself a Road Warrior.
I was sitting on a train rolling through farmland in California thinking poetic thoughts when the title first occurred to me. I am not certain at all if I will be able to maintain that lifestyle. I certainly don’t want to as I have too much I want to be home for but it pays the rent and that is big.
I have acquired a lot of adjectives in my life. I collect them. And I could turn any one or two of them into a subject to be publicly introspective about – Blind, Jewish, lesbian, Over 40, single adoptive parent of teens placed in my home after age 18. And more I may talk about later.
I have a lot of hard places around how I am seen or not seen because of my blindness by people who only relate to their stereotypes when they meet me and not the person I really am. And over the bigotry and discrimination I keep facing and the lack of access to so much that is getting worse each day. So, although I wish desperately I could ignore that part of my life, I decided instead to make a statement up front in hopes that, if anything, the title would become an overstatement or at least help me to find a different angle on that particular experience.
travel teen adoption
single parenting
lesbian
judaism
blindness
foster care
