Violence Against Women And Blind Rage Against Men

"Would you like to meet God," he asked me. Before I could say anything, there was a switchblade against my throat. This did not happen to me in a dark alley in some sleazy neighborhood. This was not some stranger. This man was a PhD candidate, and we were standing in the English Department Chair's backyard attending his annual pig roast. Thankfully this man's good friend, J, was standing nearby and quickly disarmed him. R. had a perverse sense of humor, and perhaps he meant this as some kind of joke. I never asked. Nor did I ever report this to anybody. For years it was a blocked memory. When I remembered the incident again, it was then that it was truly traumatic.

The woman who set me up to be driven home from her party by the Director of Graduate Studies probably only intended for me to freaked out by his drunk driving. When I told her how he had grabbed me as I tried to leave his car, I think she realized the practical joke wasn't quite so funny. She knew he was drunk. Did she also know that he was a womanizer? Was for my safety, she explained, so I wouldn't have to walk home alone in the dark. Never mind that I feared for my life as he drove us back to campus. I had him drop me off several blocks away from the over twenty-one/grad dorm I was living in.. Little did I know that this arm was going to reach for me and slam me against him. At the least he wanted to plant a sloppy kiss on my mouth. And at the worst... I escaped with only a kiss on my cheek. Some joke. Real knee slapper.

"You'll read about me in the news tomorrow," my ex-boyfriend said as he let a bullet roll out of his jacket pocket as he walked away from my study carrel, in a failed attempt to get back together with me. I was shaken to the core, but I was resolute not to re-establish a romantic relationship with him. His emotional manipulation confirmed for me that my judgment was sound. A dodged bullet, as a friend of mine later would say.

I have never ended up in a hospital having a rape kit done, or having bruises tended to or bones set. I have felt frightened and humiliated. I was hit. Once. Against the side of my face. I saw shades of blue. For a few moments. That was bad, but, overall, I've been very lucky. My experiences pale in comparison with those of women who have been far more brutalized. . I have had men who loved me say really brutal things to me. I have been screamed at. I was once shoved back into a chair as I was getting up to leave. These things have occurred at the hands of otherwise loving, caring men. And that is why this is all so difficult. There are shades of gray. Sometimes it's a one time only event.

Some times one time is all a man will get. "I told my husband that if he ever hit me, he'd better make it good one," a former co-worker once said to me. I doubt her husband ever did. Some of us are stronger than others. We have greater resolve. Others make excuses. Say they deserve it.


Sympathy often lies with the woman being abused. When a woman is the abuser instead, we are shocked to the core. When a woman mutilates a man the way this woman did recently, some cynical people will say, "he deserved it," or "he had it coming," in much the same way that our society often tries to discredit rape victims. This reaction by Sharon Osbourne of The Talk, CBS' knock off of The View, pinpoints the double standard we have towards men who are abused. We don't know the circumstances. Had this man abused her? Had he done no more than merely telling her he wanted a divorce? It really doesn't matter. I personally neither want nor need to know all the sordid details. The women on The Talk lend sufficient conjecture and imagination and imagery.


As David Letterman said on The Late Show, in reaction to hearing the statement from the hospital that the man was "OK," no, this man is really not OK. How can this man possibly OK? (Paraphrasing his remarks.) As with women who have been brutalized, this man will never be OK again. No doubt he will survive and lead some kind of life, but his life has been changed forever. And in a swift, brutal and premeditated attack.

We, as a society, can try to justify the double standards in the reaction to this brutality. Women are abused by men all the time. Some of them die at the hands of men who supposedly love them. We forget that sometimes the abusive one is the woman and that sometimes men die, too. If we discount rape victims, we doubly doubt male rape victims. If we dismiss acts of violence, we doubly dismiss acts of violence against men. in all likelihood, this is possibly a daily occurrence. In all likelihood violence against men undoubtedly go underreported. if it's difficult for a woman to issue a complaint, how much harder must it be, in this blame or shame the victim society, for a man to step forward and admit abuse.

Women have very legitimate reasons for anger, and I would be the last one to say that any emotion was invalid. There is, however, a big difference between anger, which can, in a calm, assertive way, move things in a positive direction, and blind rage, which strikes out indifferently and often for the wrong reasons.

We also need to acknowledge that emotional and psychological violence can be traumatic and leave interior scars if not exterior ones. Whether a man is a henpecked husband or physically brutalized, it doesn't matter. By the same token, it doesn't matter if a woman is raped and beaten or if she is screamed at and told how fat or inept she is. The results stay with us. And, worse, we tend to carry this forward, one way or another.

The first step we all take in stopping all violence is to first acknowledge one another's humanness. We don't have to understand each other. That is the ideal, but it's unlikely to happen. When we stop viewing others as The Other, that, says, this atheist, is when we meet God.

Kid O Is All Right, And I'm Not Too Much The Worse For Wear

"She's gone, Deb," said the voice on the phone. Gone? I couldn't comprehend. On a trip? On a vacation?

"She's gone," the voice belonging to a long time aide, Mrs. T said. "Her son called me this morning."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I felt like I had been sucker punched.This wasn't a vacation or a trip to the hospital.This was permanent.

Ms. AK, as she was known, the woman who had taken me under her wing for the past two years, had passed away two months practically to the day after she had retired.

"She asked me to find out if the kids were OK," Mrs T continued. Even at the end Ms. AK worried about her kids.

The kids were all right, but at that moment I was not. My first thought was how was I going to tell Kid O that her beloved teacher was no more. My second thought was a feeling of betrayal. Why hadn't she told me that she wasn't going to be around in the fall as she had promised? I wondered. And continue to wonder. Maybe there wasn't enough time. Or maybe she didn't want to have to comfort me on top of her own struggles. All I knew was that there was not going to be that fall meeting that would have eased the transition from her to this new teacher. No team building. No assurances that Kid O would continue to get what she needed.

Mrs. T and I talked some more. She told me that Ms. AK had even contacted McCormick Place about the Special Ed conference she wanted to hold. She and I had spoken one night about that in the spring when she confirmed for me that, yes, she was retiring in June. I realized that her work of educating educators about Special Ed kids was at least as important as staying in the classroom and doing what she did best: loving the kids in her classroom.

And she did love those kids. Fiercely. Gently. Her huge heart accepted all. I used to come and watch her interact with those kids.The Severe to Profound kids are probably the most hard to reach kids because they are very deep inside of themselves. She touched their minds. I am sure of it. She taught me as much about love and acceptance as about advocacy. I'll never forget the look of love on her face as she interacted with one of those kids. It's a calm look. Look of connection. Heart to heart. Soul to soul.

The first time I met Ms AK was when she invited me to meet with her in her classroom towards the end of the school year. This woman, who was half Irish, half Italian and married to a Palestinian Muslim, seemed larger than life to me. As she told me about her educational philosophy, I stood there flabbergasted. After two years of having Kid O with a substandard teacher, this woman was more than a lifeline. She was a lush oasis in the middle of an educational desert. No, she wasn't a mirage. And, for the first time in six years, I could speak frankly with someone about what I had observed about Special Education.

She insisted that Kid O attend ESY in her classroom instead of at the school she would soon be leaving. In the middle of summer, she called me in and we redid Kid O's IEP. Ms AK had a fine legal mind, and she went through the IEP line by line. She explained to me that some things were CYA. Some were illegal. I was astonished. And a bit embarrassed. I have a Master's degree, but I never really went through the wording of these IEPs. I assumed, incorrectly, that the wording was straight forward. I had been bamboozled, and I am certain that I am far from the only parent who is.

Kid O started to thrive under Ms AK's guidance. She was happy to go to school again. Although kids were mentally disabled, most of them were not physically disabled. Kid O loved the attention she received from her new, ablebodied friends. The girls in particular wanted to nurture her, something that Kid O just loved.

One girl became her partner in crime. Ms AK would pair them up for computer time. "I don't know how they do it," she'd confide in me, "but they manage to get out of the program." I could just imagine Kid O giggling mischievously. Whether it was through spastic happenstance or if Kid O really knew what she was doing, I just loved the idea of these two girls who had been written off doing something unexpected. I would imagine that Kid O was the ringleader in any mischief making.

Kid O was mislabeled, but I didn't care because she was in Ms AK's class, and I knew that Ms AK recognized her intelligence. Ms AK gave me access to her, as she did with all of her parents. I had her cell number as well as her home phone number.

I would call Ms AK up about a question about Kid O, and we would talk about gardening, redecorating her house, her husband, her sons, and, in the final months of her mother's life, she would vent to me about her brothers. No matter what we talked about she would always interject humor into the conversation. We both had a strong sense of the absurd.

When her mother died, I went to the wake. It was abundantly clear to me Ms AK had never left her Irish Catholic roots. She took my hand and led me to the open casket. She was proud of the dress she had chosen for her mother, and all the pictures surrounding the casket. It all made me uneasy, but I didn't let on. She needed my support then, and so I murmured something approving. Little could I have known that approximately six months later, I'd be taking Kid O to that same funeral home to view a mercifully closed casket to be used to lay her beloved teacher to rest.

Even at the wake, Kid O was very social. She was mad when I started to wheel her back to the minivan. We saw the principal and assistant principal arrive. We saw the case manager. We spoke to Kid O's occupational therapist. I had rolled her around the room two, three times. Gazed at all the pictures. Met one of Ms AK's brothers. We extended our condolences to Ms AK's sons and her husband. I had signed the guestbook. There was nothing left to do on that warm August evening but to go home. Ms AK's elder son helped me get Kid O back into her carseat, as she was being especially difficult about it. In the middle of his grief, he gave his warmth.

Ms AK had been looking forward to retirement. I was envious of the tickets she had to see Buddy Guy. I doubt she ever got to use them, as I imagine that the cancer and heart disease she had worked rapidly. I had wondered why she was at the doctors as often as she was. Staring at that closed casket, I finally had some inkling about why.

When I envision Ms AK, it is with coffee and cigarettes and wearing what I came to think of as her Johnny Cash outfit: a black pantsuit stretched out over that large frame of hers. The first day I saw her she was wearing that pantsuit, and the very last time I saw her alive she was wearing that pantsuit.

No matter what was going on in her life, a smile always played about her lips. Ms AK would tell me, her eyes filled with mischief, how she was skipping the staff development day. The principal would give her dispensation, she explained, because she was so invaluable to the school. No one could deny that she was a devoted teacher. She took about as much time with her parents as she did with her kids. And, if there was time, she'd tell you a story. Once, she told me with great relish, about her Italian grandfather who built a landmark condominium in Rogers Park and who had smoked expensive cigars. I imagined it was he who inspired her joie de vivre, but the twinkle in her eyes and the way she had of telling a story was pure Irish.

That is how I prefer to think of her. Cup of coffee in one hand. Cigarette in the other. Her voice low from years of smoking. Laughing at some absurdity and twinkle in her eyes.

I don't know if you are around Ms AK, but Kid O is all right. And I am not too much the worst for wear.

My MissShuganah Mame Goes To The ER. And Yet Again

As my husband and I sped down the Kennedy, I called my mother's helper. The ambulance siren in the background confirmed for me that she and my mother were on their way to the ER. Wasn't sure what was going on with my mother, except that I knew that she wasn't herself. I had called her up that Tuesday morning just like I do every morning. At first her voice sounded garbled. I asked her how she felt. "I don't know," she answered.

When I walked into the ER, I discovered my mom was already hooked up to an IV. She had a temperature of 104.8, and her blood pressure was steadily dropping. Last thing I wanted to do was be scared in front of my mom. I needed to be able to give my brothers information, and I needed to be to ask and answer questions of medical staff. My mother never lost consciousness, but whatever she was fighting clearly wiped her out. My mother is normally a light olive, and she looked very pale.

"Would your mother like a priest or a chaplain," the nurse asked me. "We're Jewish," I explained. "Oh, we've got a really great rabbi," she responded. I felt like I was being told menu options. "We're out of walleye, but the chef makes a really great chicken vesuvio." I refrained from asking,"So, you don't expect my mother to survive?" Part of me wanted to ask if they had a secular humanist on staff. Neither my mother nor I are particularly religious, may all the rabbis on the family tree forgive us.

The resident asked to speak to me outside my mom's cubicle. Asking for family member to step out of earshot of patient suggests things may not bode well. Does she have a DNR, he asked. I am pretty sure she did, but I wasn't sure where. He told me they could insert a blood line, which I later learned was called a PIC line. I consulted my mom and my brothers. We all agreed that as long as a PIC line didn't mean cutting her open to install it then they were to go ahead and do it. The PIC line was to allow for more medicine to enter her bloodstream to help her fight the infection she had. Other than that, they were going to try to make her as comfortable as possible. In other words, let her die.

I was very philosophical about it as I waited to hear back from my brothers. My mom is 91. Assuming she were to make it that far, she will turn 92 in August. I was in the ER and thinking, well, we will all miss her but she is 91 and has had a good, long life. I was also thinking and if she were to depart it would be on top of her mental game. I hope to be so lucky some day.

As I was pondering my mother's fate, I watched her blood pressure tumble to 104/47 I tried to get the attention of some nurses. ERs are insanely busy places, and, this time was more chaotic than usual. They had a patient they had to restrain and whose ravings could be heard clear across the entire ER. Finally, with what felt like much arm waving, I got the nurse's attention. I was told that 104/47 was nothing to worry about. I asked her, when do you start worrying? More like say 80/30. All righty. Was good to have a guideline. Right then my mom's blood pressure stopped being in free fall, and started to slowly rise back to normal.

My mother motioned for me to come closer. In a barely audible voice, she asked me about bin Laden. She asked me if she could have a newspaper. I knew then she wasn't ready to check out. I breathed a sigh of relief. A few days later it was revealed that she had had an e coli infection.

Six months earlier, my mother needed to be given BP meds intravenously. Her blood pressure had been too high after she had done a face plant in her apartment. "What are they doing to me," my mother asked, as the weird beeping noise of the blood pressure cuff going off had startled her awake. My mother knew where she was, but she panicked. She was breathing shallowly. When I finally got a nurse, she told my mother that her blood pressure had stabilized and that everything was being monitored. That did little to convince her that she was OK. Finally the man who had placed the IV in returned and he helped calm her down. He demonstrated deep breathing for her, and she copied him. After that she started breathing more regularly.

I was settling into listening to Garrison Keillor when the phone rang. My mother had managed to drag herself back to her bed after falling on her carpeted bedroom floor. She asked me to come downtown, and retrieve her walker from her kitchen.

When I arrived about an hour later, her apartment was dark. I rolled her walker to her bedside, and she went to the bathroom. I examined her bedroom floor. Didn't take a forensics expert to figure out which direction she had fallen. There was a huge imprint and pool of blood where her nose had hit. At first I thought she had just broken her nose. Then I saw her bruised right arm. I knew, at the very least, that she needed to have her arm looked at.

"Where's your pendant," I asked. "On the dresser," she responded. The pendent was nowhere to be seen. I finally found it over a doorknob. I sighed.

I called my mother's helper who thankfully was able to drive down and help me double team her. My mother was bargaining with me. Couldn't we wait a few hours? Couldn't we "sleep" on it? I told her I was either going to take her to the ER now, or I was going to go home. As we stood and debated the issue, my mother's face developed bruises under her eyes. She looked as if she had gone a few rounds with a mugger.

I thought of ways to try to convince her to go to the ER. First I brought up how I'd catch hell from my eldest brother. That only caused her to scowl. Her helper agreed with me that she needed to go to the ER, but my mother still dug in her heels.

I decided then that I needed to fight dirty. I reminded her how, just the previous May, I had been investigated for medical neglect by DCFS. I told her that if we waited until morning to bring her into the ER, the staff would be suspicious of me. A face plant could just as easily look like a fist plant. I told her that any delay could case medical staff to report me for alleged elder abuse. My mom didn't want to get me into trouble. She grudgingly agreed to let her helper get her dressed and into helper's car.

Both times my mom was in the ER, she naturally wanted to go home. One time was during the day. The other time was late evening and in the middle of the night. The time in the middle of the night was tiring but pretty much uneventful. These trips to the ER were between six to eight hours, with another half hour to an hour to stick around and talk to hospital staff once she had been admitted.

Last October, when I left the hospital at about 3:30 in the morning, I decided to walk the entire distance back to where I had left my car. "No one can get any action in this town," a man muttered as I waited for the light to change on Michigan Avenue. "Except at my house." I was silently responding, "No thank you," as I crossed. Window washers were just starting their day. Lovers paused at the bridge before crossing the Chicago River.

I thought for a moment about sacking out at my mother's apartment. Then I decided, no, I was going to drive home. When I got home at about 4:30, I called my brothers and gave them an update. They thanked me for the update. I logged into Twitter. Surfed a bit. Then I fell into bed at about 5:20 AM. I had put in a twenty-three hour day. I thought, this is what it must feel like for interns and residents. I also decided that even if I were about twenty-five years younger, I wouldn't want that grueling schedule. One twenty-three hour day was enough. My mother has been advised that I don't want to do this again. She agrees.

Tiny Tim Has a Telepathic and Very Dark Conversation With a Young Woman in Wheelchair

Note: Apologies to Charles Dickens and to people who love Dickens, especially Christmas Carol.

Imagining Tiny Tim as a young man somehow transported through time and space from 19th Century England to 21st Century America. When I mention the girl in the wheelchair talking, she is really using telepathy.


"God bless us everyone," Tim says to himself in a mocking tone. "Bloody hell," he continues as he moves a crippled claw to his mouth to take a drag on the cigarette he is having during his fifteen minute break. It's almost Christmas time and Tim shivers while he stands outside of the sheltered workshop where he works. He snorts with derisive laughter. A cripple doing menial labor. Some perverse irony in that, he thought. That strange girl in the wheelchair laughed all the time. She couldn't do much of anything. Often times she will drop things just to watch him pick it up. She annoyed the hell out of him. At the same time he sometimes couldn't help but laugh with her.

Fate, Tim mused, had been very unkind to him. He roundly cursed out Scrooge's ghosts. "Crazy old coot," he muttered. "All that talk about ghosts showing him the past, present and future." Why couldn't the bastard let him die. What kind of life was this working for pennies a day folding napkins and placing them together with a plastic fork and knife, sliding them into a cellophane wrapper and placing them on a conveyor belt where a machine sealed the cellophane shut? Tim sighed. He had been so optimistic as a boy. Back to work.

He was starting to fold napkins again when he heard a feminine voice speak. "We really are blessed," the voice said. Tim looked around. The only one next to him was the girl in the wheelchair who couldn't talk. She had dropped a whole bunch of plasticware on the floor. Tim picked it up. "Kind of ridiculous, isn't it," the voice continued. "expecting a someone with spastic fingers to do this kind of work." The girl laughed uproariously. Tim did a double take. "Wait that was you, wasn't it? But how...?"

"It's telepathy, Tim," she responded. And laughed some more. "I am so bored," she added. "Aren't you?"

"Is that why you keep dropping napkins and plasticware?"

The girl giggled again.

"My folks used to call it ablebodied fetch," she explained.

"Used to," Tim asked, as he bend down yet again to pick things up the girl had dropped.

The girl shrugged. At least that is how he interpreted it. Then he saw something he had never seen before. She looked very sad.

"What happened to them," he asked as he straightened up yet again.

"My mom threw herself in front of a trolley in Philadelphia," the girl said sadly.

Tim felt the color drain from his face. How could she laugh at all, he wondered. If his mother had done that, he wouldn't be able to function at all. At least his mother was still alive and sometimes she and his sisters came to visit. "And your dad," he was afraid to ask.

"My dad couldn't function without her," the girl explained. "No one to make calls for him or pay the bills. He lost the house I grew up in. Everything except his bicycle. He's homeless now and often can be seen muttering to himself and crying."

Tim put a hand on her shoulder. "I am so sorry," he said, reflecting on how his own dad died from a heart attack one morning while crossing the street. He missed his dad, but at least he died of natural causes.

"I see him sometimes," she continued. "Every so often he seems to recognize me again and comes back to embrace me again the way he used to," she said, with a catch in her voice.

"He was in jail for a while for defacing currency," she added. "That is when my mom ... you know... it broke her heart... one thing too many she wrote in the note she mailed from Philly."

Tim averted his gaze. He felt a tear slide down his cheek. All this time he had been so annoyed with her. He had no idea.

"Hey," she said. "At least I had her for as long as I did. The people at DCFS didn't take me and my sister away. They could have."

He looked surprised. She had never mentioned a sister before. Then again he never asked. "You have a sister? Does she ever visit you?"

The girl shrugged. "From time to time. She loves me. But I stress her out. She doesn't listen very well. My mom used to hear me. My sister only heard me on the outside. Just the noises you usually hear. My mom tried to get her to really listen, but she just wasn't able to. She does care in her own way. She sometimes sends me a check."

Tim understood. His sisters had their own lives. They had gotten married and had their husbands and kids to look after. Lives of their own. He sighed. He wished he had a life of his own. Instead of whatever this was. But at least if he opened up his mind and his heart, he could finally hear her and have someone laugh with during the day. He sighed and continued on with the piecemeal work they were assigned to do.

"How come I can suddenly hear you," he asked.

The girl laughed. "You're a tough nut to crack, Tim. I've tried dozens of times."

He looked away ashamed. He had been so bitter about his own circumstances that he never really tried to connect with her.

"I'm sorry," he said slowly.

"It is OK, Tim. Honest. I know you have had a lot on your mind."

Didn't excuse his bad behavior, he thought to himself. "Nah. Should have tried to talk to you. That way we both could have had companionship."

They worked a little longer in silence. So many things he wanted to ask her.

"How did you end up at this sheltered workshop," he finally asked.

The girl looked away as if to a far off place.

"She gave up," she said softly. "She just couldn't fight any more. And then when my dad went to jail for defacing currency, well, that was the straw that broke the camel's back."

Tim thought for a moment. "Did she say goodbye to you," he asked.

"She didn't have to," the girl responded. "I knew." After a moment she continued. "She said goodbye, anyway, but we almost conversed the way that you and I are doing. That's how close we were."

They worked together in silence.

"She and I hugged heads."

Tim looked up. "What do you mean, hugged heads?"

"When I was a baby, my mom used to reach down and tell me 'hug heads,' and she would hug my head and I would reach up and hug hers. And that is what we did before she left for Philadelphia. That is how she said goodbye to me."

They worked on in silence. Tim didn't know what to say to this girl, this young woman who he had simply thought of as a bother.

"Wouldn't it be great," he finally said at last, "if they treated us as if we were fully human and not imbeciles just because we are disabled."

The girl nodded. "Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if others listened to me the way you just did."

"I am sorry that I didn't listen sooner," Tim said. He wondered if, by listening now, these shadows could disappear just like they did for Scrooge.

"That is OK. You are listening now," the young woman said. "That is really all that matters."

"Yeah," he said.

A few minutes later he added, "You are right. We are blessed."

Survival Instead of Suicide, Shifting the Paradigm from Victim to Compassionate Survivor

I am a bullying survivor.

All throughout grammar school,I was either teased or bullied. When kids are taunted because, like me, they have "Pick on me, I am sensitive," emblazoned on their foreheads, is there much difference? Either way a child is meant to feel as if they are not as good as everyone else. Kids know innately when someone is sensitive and vulnerable. I don't need to read "Lord of the Flies." When you are a sensitive kid wishing, hoping, praying that other kids will like you, that is your life. And when, like me, you don't have any real refuge at home, you wish you were dead. Eleven year olds should not be wanting to kill themselves. But they do.And some succeed. Or rather,they fail to grasp that there are benefits to staying alive.They fail to see that suicide is, as some glibly put it, a permanent solution to a temporary situation.The pain feels permanent.

When i was eleven, we moved from Chicago's Southeast side to the suburbs. I thought, new town, new school, I'd have a respite from the bullies. Start over. I was hanging up my jacket on the first day of school when I saw a face I hadn't seen in several years. Was a bully who had moved away three years earlier. He recognized me straight away. "Miller, you are gonna get it!" He made sure that the other kids knew who I was. His best friend was in a nearby classroom. And the best friend's cousin was in my classroom. I had also left behind the mean girls, only to find myself besieged by another set of mean girls.

My desire to end it all was childish, yet my pain was very real. I imagined my funeral. People were gonna stand around at graveside and wish they had been kinder to me. I suppose that, in the case of suicides, the more realistic scenario is that survivors are angry with the person for giving up. No doubt there is some guilt thrown in for good measure.

On Columbus Day 1969 I went down to the kitchen. Instead of joining my folks at the breakfast table, I opened up the knife drawer and started testing knives for sharpness by placing my finger tip against the edge of each one. My dad sat there frozen, but my mom asked me what I was doing. I told her. She got up from the kitchen table and had me close the drawer. I followed her upstairs to my bedroom, and we sat on the bed and talked. She talked to me about how suicide is against God's law. I don't know if that argument would have worked on me if I had all ready been an atheist. All that matters is that it worked then. Mainly I think I realized how hurtful my actions could have been.I still remember the stricken look on my dad's face as he sat there at the table. Even without my mom saying a word to me, I think I knew how much pain I would have caused him. In my self pity, I had not considered how my actions would affect others.Just that I wanted them to be sorry.

Even as I was testing knives for sharpness, I knew I couldn't have gone through with it.I've always had an aversion to sharp objects. If I had escaped upstairs with a knife, I am certain I would have broken down sobbing instead. The pain was real, but the drama made it almost laughable. I got the attention I wanted,but scenes like this is why I occasionally refer to myself as a drama queen in recovery. It's not those of us filled with drama who people have to watch out for. It's the quiet ones who don't come down to the kitchen to test out knives with a dramatic flourish who we need to watch out for.

One can live past childhood, but unless one undergoes therapy or similar there is little way to get past the scars left behind by bullying. The watershed moment for me was in eighth grade when I finally stood up to bullies. All throughout junior high I was afraid of these boys. Eddie was the ringleader. Steve was the big, dumb one,and Paul was the short one. Paul may have been small, but he was great at dumping books in the hall. There was also Mike, but he was not really one of the bullies. He just happened to be Eddie's best friend.

In junior high I was in drama club. On those days I didn't fear the bullies because I stayed after school. The bullies had already gone home. On days that I didn't stay after school, I was often quasi chased by them. They didn't make me run, but they made me aware of their presence. I walked very fast on those days. One winter afternoon,I slipped on the ice right in front of Eddie's house. I had been wearing a skirt that day, and I tore my hose and skinned my knee. As I struggled to gather up my school books and get up, Eddie was crowing triumphantly, "Spit on her! Spit on her!" I turned to him and I said, "You son of a bitch." Eddie's older brother stood there in the opening of the garage. "What did you call him," he asked menacingly. "I called him a son of a bitch," I answered defiantly, all the while certain that, at that moment, the four, five of them were going to gang up on me.To this day it surprises me that neither of those boys made a move to wallop me. There were, to my knowledge, no adults around.Who knows what they could have done to me in that subdivision. But they didn't.After a tense moment, they let me go on my way.And they never taunted me again.

No one had taught me how to fend off bullies.Not my mom.Not my dad.Not my older brothers.Not any teachers.Not any friends.Took me years to figure it out.When a person asserts oneself, they are standing their ground.When I called Eddie a son of a bitch, I was clearly angry.I did not yell.I did not scream. It was a tense few minutes, but very little drama. That is how we stop bullies.We assert a quiet authority.

Last March when the DCFS investigator towered over me, and insisted I had to take Kid O to the ER right then and there, I stood my ground. I was quaking inside, but I still managed to calmly state to her, no, I wasn't going to take her to the ER for an alleged scratch. I told her that I would take her to the pediatrician's office first thing in the morning. She started to try to reassert her authority, but she backed down.

It is wonderful when kids have others to back them up, whether it's other kids or adults. Ultimately, however, kids are going to grow up and they will have to face bullies on their own. It is important that we teach kids how to be ethical, honorable and authentic human beings who know how to be calm in the face of adversity. If we do not teach kids how to be independent, self-assured adults, then we do let the bullies win. Victims will continue to be victims instead of survivors.

It's especially important that we, as a society, shift from the language and mindset of victimhood to the language of survival. It is not just for the sake of political correctness that we do that. It is so that we can facilitate the shift in many people to accept responsibility for themselves and their own survival. Women are not rape victims, for instance, but rape survivors.We do not talk about Holocaust victims. We talk about Holocaust survivors.

We are all responsible for the culture that in which bullying thrives. We all need to participate in the prevention of bullying. More importantly we need to all be responsible for how we talk about bullying.If we talk about victims instead of survivors, then we perpetuate that idea that someone bigger and stronger will always take out the more vulnerable amongst us. Each and every one of us, former bullies and former bullying survivors alike, are responsible for this paradigm shift.Language is powerful.How we label people and actions affects how we think about them and ultimately how we react and what kind of behavior we display. In this particular instance we cannot afford to be careless in how we use language. We need protect the more vulnerable members of our society, but we also teach them, as best as we can, how to fend for themselves. We need to help them how to grow up to be strong, self assured adults instead of weak, dependent ones.

Equally important as the shift in language is shift in consciousness from that of a bully to that of a compassionate person. When I was in eighth grade, I was standing in the lunch line with C and L, who were my fellow misfits. C, upon realizing she was no longer being picked on, decided that she would then pick on L, who had the misfortune of being covered with acne and who had a terribly nasal voice. I didn't say anything to C, but it was the beginning of the end of our friendship. I realized then and there that I did not want to be yet another mean girl. Right that moment I chose compassion.

We need to do more than simply teach children how to be survivors.We teach them to be ethical, honorable and compassionate as they become adults.We teach them how to share. We teach them to be generous and loving, not selfish and self-centered.We teach them how to be forgiving. If we do not do these things at this critical juncture, then we will ultimately fail as a society. This is our moral imperative. Not just parents. Not just educators. All of us.

Special Needs Kids Arrive, No Patron Saints or Guardian Angels Included

I don't know if Erma Bombeck ever had a special needs child, and I am not one to pick bones with the dead. Overall she presents a nice image of the mother of special needs child, but some of it comes dangerously close to the kind of sentimental claptrap I have been railing against for years. At the end she says:

And what about her Patron saint? asked the angel, his pen poised in mid-air.

God smiles, "A mirror will suffice."

For a woman with less emotional wherewithal, more than a mirror is needed. Bombeck assumes that all mothers of special needs moms will somehow all be strong, and, once the shock wears off, she will do just fine. The shock, anger and grief diminish over time, but they never really wear off.

I remain haunted by an event that took place almost ten years ago. Kid O was invited to a birthday party, her first and last. My husband stayed home with the baby Kid Q, and off Kid O and I went. Her classmate's family lived on the second floor of an old walk up apartment. The apartment was dark. The apartment was packed with people, however, a mix of the dad's family and the mom's family. They had hired a clown to entertain the ablebodied kids while the two disabled kids were largely ignored, tucked away on the couches in the living room. Both kids, KId O and her classmate, A, very much wanted to be included. Despite the fact that their son was celebrating his fifth birthday, there was no joy in that apartment. A's dad was a very angry man. A's mom looked really sad and resigned. My heart went out to her. Even as she was surrounded by family, her sadness was very apparent. A wore AFOs and so he could stand but only with assistance. No one seemed interested in helping the birthday boy join in the fun. A's dad wanted me to join him in his anger and resentment. I would not.

As these two five year olds sat in the recesses of the apartment, A's dad turned to him and said, "I don't know why we hired a clown. We already have you." I filled with grief for the son and for the mom to be saddled with such a horrible man. How could he be so unkind to someone who depended on him so? I understood the resentment at being denied what everyone else had to seemed to have: a "normal" child. What I couldn't understand was A's dad lashing out at him in such a cruel and public way. A may have been only five, but he understood that he was far from what could be desired in a son.

I could also not understand the obliviousness of the rest of A's family. I suspect, sadly enough, that A's mom felt too downtrodden to ask them to see to it that the birthday boy was included, and A's dad was too filled with rage to care. It was A's birthday, and he was being ignored by his entire extended family. I could not fault the clown. She was just doing what she was asked to do, and that was entertain the kids. She largely had them participate in races such as she could in that cramped apartment. I motioned for the clown to come over. She had those banner ribbons that kids so enjoy, and I figured that, at the very least, these kids, with assistance, could play with those. She gave me a ribbon banner and she gave one to the birthday boy. And for a few moments on that dreary day, those two kids were part of the fun. Kid O lit up when I placed the banner in her hand and helped her wave it around.

While it's comforting to think that all special needs kids go to strong women with great senses of humor, it doesn't align with reality. Even with family and friends around, a parent can feel horribly alone and left to despair. The grief is real. The anger is real. The sense of betrayal all the more so. If, as Erma Bombeck wrote, special needs children do not come with patron saints or guardian angels, then God, assuming there is one, has some explaining to do. At the very least someone needs to explain to me where to go and get one, like so many triple A batteries so I can get recharged.

Raising a special needs child can be exhausting, especially when a child is severely disabled. Everything needs to be done for them. That's becomes even more demanding as a child gets older. At the very least I could do with a guardian angel who could lend a set of hands to make the work lighter. Kid O is probably around 70 pounds and around five feet tall. She is not a passive sack of potatoes when she is carried from her wheelchair to some other chair in the living room, for instance. She may cooperate or she may kick and bare her teeth as if she were going to bite me. She may also scream or shriek. She is not passive, to say the least, and, frankly, I have yet to know a child or young adult of any age who is. Kid O has little autonomy, so it's understandable that she may choose to express herself in various physical ways.

While it's true I am patient, have a great sense of humor and at least a little bit selfish, I still have times when I feel I just cannot move another inch. I cannot imagine what it would be like for someone who doesn't have my inner strength. Having any child is not for the faint of heart, let alone one who turns out to be a special needs kids. Parents of "normal" kids have enough challenges, let alone parents of kids with special needs. And sometimes people who have "normal" kids crack, too. You read about it in the papers. 'Cause kids are kids first, and they disabled or have special needs second.

My mom, the pragmatist though she is, has this odd romantic streak about marriage and children. Everyone should get married, and everyone should have kids. Kids can be wonderful, but, as any honest person will tell you, they are a lot of work. And some people are not cut out to be married let alone have kids. We all have curves thrown our way as we go through life. We cope the best we can with challenges. Some cope better than others. Whether this is through attending a support group or going to therapy or actually having good family and friends to support us, it's important to have someone or something. And that even includes God. I don't believe in God, but I do not ever knock those who have faith. Sometimes, though, none of that is enough. Some people simply are ill equipped to deal with life, and a special needs kid may be the thing that sends them over the edge and into the chasm.

What many of us need and seldom get is the support of that elusive village. Families are spread out. Friends work. People often have their own problems. Often we don't ask those with extra burdens how they are coping or if they need anything. Too many parents flounder about. They feel overwhelmed. Perhaps they are embarrassed to ask for help or don't know where to go to ask for help. Or they think they ought to suck it up and go it alone, even as they are going down for the third time. And taking their child with them. Solutions that may seem obvious to someone else is not necessarily obvious to a parent right in the middle of trying to figure out why this child came along and turned their lives upside down. Many times we know what the solutions are. We just don't always have what it takes to bring those solutions about.

If I cannot have a village, then I'd at least like to sometimes have an extra pair of hands. Or maybe someone with wings.

Kid O Is CPed, or How Crippling Language and Sentimentality Dehumanizes Disabled Children and Adults

This past Monday I came back to Twitter after a weekend away only to have to face up to the error of my ways in regards to the word "handicapped." This led to much anger, angst and upset on my part. Yesterday morning I logged into Twitter to this post from a twitter friend. (OK, it's Ira.) focusing on whether Tiny Tim was a negative or positive portrayal of a disabled child. I've read Dickens but not A Christmas Carol, so I've only had the Hollywood sentimentalization to go by.

All these years I felt that Dickens was presenting me with a caricature of a disabled child, when, in fact, it was Hollywood all along who was deserving of my contempt. I should have known better, as works like Bleak House, for instance, point out how acutely aware Dickens was of the struggle of the working class. I wish that my Victorian Lit class had been taught incorporating Ira's historical knowledge, as it would have been a much more meaningful experience for me. I was so uninspired by the class that it's the only time I needed a professor to pick a paper topic for me. This was a graduate level class, too.

I always objected to the pure sentimentalization and emotional manipulation of Tiny Tim as depicted by Hollywood. Now that Ira Socol has separated out Hollywood versions from the original, I now understand how Tiny Tim was included within his family while not being included by the rest of society. There is perhaps a subtle irony with which Dickens has Bob Cratchit report Tim's assertion that, "...he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.'"


The bitter truth is that those attending church that day very likely looked the other way because they did not want to be reminded of disabled children and other imperfections of creation. After all if there is a God then there'd be no misery of any kind because God would be merciful and not allow for such blemishes on his peoplescape. Religious people do not want to have their sentimental visions of a god who answers their prayers shaken by harsh realities. Sorry, Tim, they are more likely wishing that you and other disabled children would conveniently disappear. Or, at the very least, get swept under the rug. Out of sight and blessedly out of mind. We cannot have emotional discomfort, especially on Christmas Day, which, since the mid-19th Century, has been subverted from celebration of Christ's birth to the the worship of material wealth and comforts, which in turn leads to shallower expressions of emotion in the form of sentimentality and nostalgia, as opposed to deeper, more authentic expressions of emotion in the form of compassion and genuine empathy for one's fellow man. That in turn leads to objectification of the disabled and other less desirable members of our society. When we objectify disabled people, we turn them into people to be pitied rather than people to be empowered.

Some of the worst offenders for rolling out the disabled child to ensure that the tote board total jumps up is Jerry Lewis and the MDA telethon. Thankfully there are organizations such as Jerry's Orphans that vividly portray what it's like to be a grown up "kid". Adults suffer from forms of muscular dystrophy, too, but they are rarely heard from.

The Kids Are All Right


The kids are all right. So are many disabled adults. I am just starting to learn about person first language. Until recently I saw no problem with the word, "handicapped." Cap in hand. Although the phrase "cap in hand" does not come from "handicapped," the connotations and images remain much the same as language evolved. And in Kid O's case, it connotes someone who could end up on the fringes of society working in a sheltered workshop.

I also realized I had never asked Kid O how she would like to be labeled (other than just a kid, that is). Given her limited ability to effectively express more complex ideas (note: not the same as being able to comprehend more complex ideas), I asked her, using a two hand system. Touch this hand for answer a) and this hand for answer b) She ruled out "handicapped" in favor of "disabled." So I took it one step further. She prefers being known as someone with cerebral palsy. My small problem with that (OK, sometimes huge amounts of angst) is that you can say, "she is handicapped," or "she is disabled." But, try as you might, you cannot say, "she is cerebral palsy." Others have suggested saying that "she is a wheelchair user." But Kid O does not use a wheelchair in the sense that she is able to wheel herself around. She sits in a wheelchair and others push her, ie, "use" it, if you will. So I am thinking I need to coin a new phrase. "She is CPed." I could give into convention and say Kid O is disabled, but that is too encompassing a word. She is CPed. Kid O doesn't have CP as if it were some dread disease. But CP is part of her identity. Kid O is a girl who has CP. It's cumbersome language. If we can say "she is handicapped" or "she is disabled," why not "she is CPed?"

Now that may seem like quibbling to some, but there is a difference between being something "blind, deaf," and having something. You have an illness. Someone may be a cancer patient, but, passively, they have cancer. Does that mean they own the cancer or that the cancer owns them? There is no ownership of cerebral palsy. It just... is. Kid O is CPed.

Kid O is not differently abled. She is not "handi-abled" as the gym teacher on Glee says. Kid O is CPed. I am not circumferentially challenged. I am fat. Kid O is not physically challenged. Kid O is CPed. Kid O is physically disabled. Kid O is a kid, actually a teenager, with many positive traits and many flaws first and the disability, cerebral palsy, that defines her second. Kid O is not an angel flying too close to the ground. Kid O does not have special "other" powers. Kid O is a human being. Sugarcoating the language about disability is to sentimentalize Kid O to the point of creating a caricature and denying Kid O her humanness. Sometimes she is a human board. Sometimes she is a mule kicking machine. Sometimes she is very primal in her communication. But one thing Kid O always is is very human. Kid O is CPed.

If we deny the disabled their right to call themselves what they will, and if we use feel good sentimental language, then we are doing a disservice to the disabled individual. Furthermore, we are doing a disservice to ourselves by denying our own discomforts with truths about the human condition. There are the infirm and disabled and disfigured among us, and we need to stop cheapening their lives by using disabled people as props and considering them objects of pity. When we objectify a human being, we are committing an act of psychic and linguistic violence. We need to look inside and figure out why we are not comfortable around certain people. We, as a society, need to confront our disablism. Disabled children and adults do not have deficits. Disabled children and adults are whole, just the way they are. Disabled children and adults are just human. Kid O is CPed.