Never Walked In High Heels

Last night I said more four letter words than I’ve said in a while.  It was time to change not just one, but all four of my tires. 

For this job, I only call in one person. 

He’s changed nearly every flat I’ve had on my wheelchair, which means I’ve seen  him sweat and swear… a lot. I used to be embarrassed by the fact that my tires were so difficult to change. Simply trying to get the tire off the hub can often prove to take over an hour. Sometimes I feel like he would be better off with four hands, and then he usually looks me and says, “Got any spoons?”

For most people it would suggest getting tire spoons. But I quickly go into the kitchen and get four desert spoons. He and I have learned over the course of three years that often the only way to pry the wheels off is by wedging four desert spoons between the wheel hub and the rubber of the tire. And so when he says ‘spoons’ I go get exactly the right  ones. Soup spoons just won’t cut it. 

Other than that, the only other thing I can do to help him is swear in my own frustration. 

For someone who prides herself on her independence, this situation is maddening. I’m stuck.  There is literally nowhere I can go, and I have to let my friend do it all. He has to do it for me. The thing is, he doesn’t actually have to do any of it. At any time he can just throw in the towel and say, “Forget it, it’s all too hard,” and just leave. 

What is it about needing help that is so humbling? I’m one of those people who would rather go without rather than ask for help. I think this is how most people are, deep down. I should be used to asking for help, but I’m not. I hate it. It’s like admitting one’s own humanity and vulnerability, which is always a deadly combination. It’s also a carefully developed fear, evolved over decades of unrealistic expectations.  The fear comes from the same place within us that says, “Just blend in and stay out of the way. Don’t cause trouble and don’t be a burden.” We’ve got some idea that life should be smooth and easy, which would leave us without ever needing help or even much thought for that matter. 

I will never encourage dependency, but asking for help is not the same thing. The difference is from the element of service that is included in the latter. If you serve someone or something, there is value implied. If you service your car, it’s because you appreciate that it can help you be mobile. That’s all your car needs to do after you fix it. You don’t expect it to repay you by turning into a Ferrari since its value is already established. It is worth the effort of making it run smoother.  

Likewise you can only serve another person when you value him. Now you can value a person for who he is (which assumes that you know him well) or you can value him for being a fellow man and all the great potential which that holds (which assumes you have never seen the guy before in you life). What you cannot do is serve a man and then expect him to change himself or his views as repayment. The trade is: you serve him because he has value to you. One cannot feed a drunkard and demand him to stop drinking as repayment. He will value himself less than you value him. A teacher should never tutor a student without the expectation the child will grow to form her own opinions once she is an adult; she will not become a carbon copy of her teacher. A government cannot serve its people and then force them to live with rationing. They will rightfully revolt. 

More often than not, ‘help’ comes with strings attached. A perfect example of this is the Special Education services of some school districts in America. Give many of those services a child who belongs in advanced placement classes, and they’ll do everything possible to ensure the kid will never the inside of a gifted classroom. Trust me, I know this. This ‘help’ is an insidious form of destruction which has two motors: increased dependency, which, of course, offers control and making educational, and disability experts feel good about themselves. There is no vision for solving inequality in  education because these guys are out to promote it. And these are the types of people who will give up when the act of serving others becomes too difficult. 

My friend won’t give up, and he won’t leave. After three years I know this. I know this because he hasn’t yet. But I can prove it too. See - while he’s wrestling with my wheels, I’m sitting there keeping up conversation, and with the two of us, it inevitably leads to a heated debate. I always refuse to agree with him because, of course, he is wrong. He doesn’t seem to care. He’ll be over as soon as there is another flat tire. And if I can understand that my friendship has value, the cycle begins again and we both profit from it. It’s more than a symbiotic relationship, it’s alive. We both are free to grow, change, challenge each other, and even remain confident in our friendship. We serve each other because we know neither will take the easy way out. We also never expect it to be easy.   

I think we work best together when there is friction.

It was a terrible year. I knew it was a terrible year when on New Year’s Eve, I saw a group of individuals coming out of their celebrations saying, “Next year has to be better, it cannot keep going as badly as this.” The following year did seem to be hard on everyone. Personally, I had a boyfriend walk out on me, lost my job, and dropped out of a masters program to which I had for years dreamed of getting in. I called my former teacher from high school one weekend, upset, frustrated, and about ready to put a hole through my wall.

“I seriously think I’m going to have some big life changing event just to get out of this horrible situation. Maybe I’ll become a lesbian.” I joked at him. Knowing that with his own homosexuality, he would get a kick out of this.

“No, don’t become a lesbian. You’d look terrible in flannel.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at his bluntness. He asked me what good was happening in my life and I struggled to come up with something. He asked what my new apartment was like and I told him about the plumbing that had broken three days before, and how I didn’t know where the money was going to come from to fix it. I burst into tears, saying, “This is not how I envisioned my life to go when I was in your class during high school. Not at all. What happened?” It was a struggle to get it back together, but I knew that if I kept sobbing into the phone, my teacher would never be able to comprehend a word I was saying.

“We’re living in the age of angst. There, Age of Angst, that should be the title of a book you write. Anyway, everyone’s having a hard time this year, not just you. And that’s ok. Sally has been having to take the past two weeks off. Her husband died two weeks ago. It was either a terrible accident, or, well, you know. He was always slightly bi-polar. So now she’s left with two young children, and very angry. I didn’t think she would be angry as much as grieving, but now anger is a large part of it.”

I stared at the phone, stunned, my jaw half open, before I felt the need to cry again for a former teacher of mine who was in extreme pain and heartache. During my year, she had just gotten married and the two of them were newlyweds, happy and faithful and full of the silliness that can only come out of a new marriage. She had no idea that this would happen. There wasn’t any sign of it. There had been friends that we all know who we have a pretty good notion from the get go that they’ll be in trouble sooner of later down their lives, but not Sally, and certainly not Sally and her husband as a couple. An early death and possible suicide was the last thing any of us could or would imagine for her. 

Truth be told, I honestly thought by the time I reached the age I was, that I would be married. Actually, growing up with movies such as the Little Mermaid, I thought it would be perfectly acceptable to get married at the age of 16. Of course, I also thought by now I would own my own pony, business, and would have completed law school. None of which, of course, is true. Turns out the pony needed too much food, the great idea of a business still has not come yet, and if things stay as they are right now, I really have no desire to go to law school. Life happens without warning and while some desires of ours are automatically built inside of us from day one, reality gets in the way, or at least rolls us into a person we never thought we would be. 

Perhaps it is a sign of youth that we can look at someone and say “well, that will never happen to me. He would never leave me like she was left. I will be able to stick to my ideals throughout, and eventually get exactly where I want to go.” Of course, things hardly work out according to our plans. Anne Lamot, says “If you want to see God laugh, show her your plans.” And it does seem that that’s often the case. 

But maybe this is all for the best that it couldn’t be any other way. When we are little, our parents tell us that we will have a life beyond our wildest dreams, and regardless of what we may think that means, at a young age we do indeed; at least I have had a life that far outweighs anything I could possibly imagine, and all of the dramas and thunderstorms ensured that the lows would be lower than I dared think about, and of course, the victories would be more surprising in the end.

In recent months, things have gotten a little bit better for me. Not much, but we’re going somewhere now. And I often think of Sally in my quiet moments, wondering how she’s doing, thinking of her teaching high school and raising two children on her own. Definitely not what any of us would sign up for in the beginning. With all that in mind, perhaps it is best we don’t know what’s in store for us when we are young. It would probably be too overwhelming to look at it all at once.

Not long ago, I found myself in a pedestrian gridlock that was enough to make any urban dweller revolt. All of the sidewalks, streets, and secret allyways of London’s Trafalgar Square were blocked by formidable officers on horseback to absolutely ensure we were going nowhere. Used to such hoopla, I asked an officer what the occasion was. Turns out, on this perfect Sunday, Bush was going through London on his farewell tour. And so, despite opinions and beliefs, facts and rumors, I found myself doing the popular thing. I too was waiting in patient expectation to see George W. Bush’s limo pass the streets of London.

Truth be told, I can’t dismiss the Bush family as easily as most. There, I said it. You can stop reading whenever you want. But as I grew up in Chicago during the 1990’s, the first president Bush had a profound effect on my life. I remember sitting in front of the television, my six year old knees scraped as always, while Bush Sr. picked up his pen and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was the first time in America that it was illegal to discriminate against me. As I went to school the teachers had to teach me. Doors opened, quite literally, so I could go to university, and now that I am an adult, I should be able to have the same dignities and respect as anyone else in society. It was this law that served as a model for other counties, such as Britain, to restore rights to their own people with disabilities. Asking me to hate the Bush family is like asking a newly freed slave to despise Abraham Lincoln. 

The limo passes in a flurry of camera phone flashes and finger-pointing. For being  such an unpopular president, Bush sure does seem to attract a lot of popularity from people who happen to be in the right place at the right time. I look at my phone and I can’t help but chuckle. It’s The President of the Untied States on my phone… and frankly it looks like any other car with tinted windows. I turn to leave. The barriers are now down and inconvenienced Londoners breathe a collective sigh of relief. 

“Finally. All I was trying to do is get to Charing Cross station,” a woman jokes to me. She says she’s going to visit her grandchildren for the week, and she’s hoping that tonight there’ll be time to bake bread with them. I smile at her, she smiles at me, and there is an instant connection. I say that I’m headed to the same place to catch the train home, hoping for an easy night.

“Oh, isn’t it sweet of them to let you take the train? It must be so nice to hold the rest of us up so you can get onboard.”

I swallow hard. For the rest of the conversation I stare dead ahead answering in one word syllables, resisting the urge to reach up and disable the woman myself to teach her a lesson in empathy. I keep telling myself to breathe and remember that she is older, so soon she’s going to fall, break a hip and learn her lesson. Or maybe she’ll go blind. Or…

I purposely lose her in the crowd. Doing so makes me feel a little more control of my life. I don’t know if I’m aggravated more at the woman or at myself for not saying anything. “Nice?” It’s the law. It’s my right to ride that train, and the fact that I can’t ride the train without giving at least 48 hours notice proves we have a long way to go before we can even talk about being “nice.” Every time the platform manager harasses me because he doesn’t want to get the ramp out, or when I have to ride an extra hour to the end of the line because no one was at my stop to help me get off, I’m reminded that freedom, while granted by law, takes awhile to trickle into actuality. 

It is easy for us to assume that because something changes legally, the problem is completely fixed.  In reality, getting a law in the books is only the first step to evolution. After that, the responsibility rests on the citizen’s shoulders. Oddly enough, it is at this point that society claims the problems as one that can be dismissed because it is remedied. We argue for legislation and for papers to be signed but after Congress is cleared and the legislators leave for home, the reformation of society still is entirely dependent on ordinary people. It is what we do on the subway, while buying jeans, the absent minded comments we make while passing each other on the street which define the rights of the individual more than any statesman would ever dream of.

At home I fix myself an obligatory cup of tea and watch the Thames from my balcony, Canary Warf looking like the land of Oz in the distance. The warmth of my home reminds me that while the outside world can turn hostile within a second, the places where I belong value me for the woman I am and for the things I have accomplished. To them, any slight allowances in time and adaptions are well worth it.