Never Walked In High Heels

I had a friend who became unexpectedly pregnant in between her junior and senior year at university. I was a year above her and had no idea of the situation until I was sent a picture of the child shortly after it was born. It was beautiful but shocking to think that a friend of mine was now able to replicate herself. She was ahead in her class credit, so took a semester off to go through the pregnancy as well as completing summer school the summer before her graduation. She graduated on time and realistically with a better plan than any of us had at the time we walked across the stage. Another friend of mine within three weeks of each other discovered that two of her sisters had also become pregnant out of wedlock. Her family is extremely conservative and were shocked as well as embarrassed by the entire situation. The amount of angst and anger which was brought on as a result of two new babies was in many ways surprising and not particularly loving.

The thing about families is it’s become a cliché; there is no such thing as a “normal” family. However to take it a step further, families in order to function (as opposed to simply being normal) are based around forgiveness. You have to forgive the people in life that you are stuck with. Normal people find it very difficult to turn the other cheek and move on. But unlike what most people would do given the chance, functional families are able to react with more love to these sort of situations and problems simply because if you are in a family together, you are stuck with each other for the rest of your lives. Run away as far as possible and they are still genetically connected to you so you might as well get used to it and recognize that their faults are probably pretty similar to your own, or at the very least, as difficult for other people to handle.

The love of families represents the type of love and commitment, as well as sacrifice, we are supposed to show to just about everyone else in the world. But by nature you are dedicated to finding the very best for your family; this is natural instinct. I’ve known families who moved into houses without furniture just so there children could attend a particularly brilliant school district. The stories abound about mothers who discover that their children are violin prodigies and then take night shifts in order to pay for lessons which cost a days wages.

There are no normal families. Ideally, we should be able to find a balance of what is good for the people that are blood related to us, whether it be stretching our boundaries of forgiveness to accept the prodigal son back one more time or simply forgetting about the fact that he didn’t take the trash out yet again. We have to learn to afford each others grace and hopefully begin to expand that talent of giving grace out into other parts of the world until other people who aren’t necessarily related to you by blood receive that type of love and sacrifice from you. A family teaches us to accept and tolerate people as they are. Whereas we would normally walk away from friends who hurt us in the same way our family does, there is no escaping the memories of growing up together and the good times.

When I told someone of my friends original plan to have the baby and then continue on with her job in the middle-east while being a single mother and waiting for the father to get out of medical school, they replied “That sounds like a stable solution, but it’s still a bizarre and improper way to start a family.” And in a way, they are right. It is bizarre and it doesn’t go by traditions, but in the end, what we accept from our loved ones is exactly that: bizarre and unexpected. One might as well acknowledge its strangeness at the start of establishing a family.

I know we love each other because we can scream at each other without worrying that it will ruin our friendship. Despite anything we say or might disagree about, or no matter how deep the issue runs, before the sun sets it will all be fine. Secure love, the best kind of friendship there is, can survive through rough waters even when going through dangerous territory is self induced. It has taken me several years to come to this conclusion, but in fact the people who you love the most are the ones you can allow to see you at your worst. Anything short of that and the relationship is built on very unstable ground.

There is of course a cliché that any couple doubtlessly believe when they first get together, and that is the idea that “we will never fight.” We hear this particularly as girls in our infancy seeing Disney movies and countless happily ever afters. All of this is infinitely harmful to our idea of what love is. More often than not, young women (and probably men, although I can’t speak from first hand experience on this one) will do anything to avoid conflict just for the sake of living up to hopelessly high expectations. Not only do they change small preferences such as what items they would normally order off a menu in order to seemingly agree with their date, but eventually it reaches into other areas as well. What they say, what movies they prefer, what books they read, and eventually what ideals they hold. All of this to be able to give the illusion that indeed, together with their mate, the two are the perfect couple.

Our idea has changed from the notion that love conquers all except for conflict and disagreement or, better yet, love can conquer anything except pure honesty. What this does is shatter our expectations of what love is. If an honest opinion is something that love won’t stand, what hope does love have to conquer any struggle?

Too often I have witnessed my female friends trying to soften the blow of truth when a situation is particularly sticky. They wind up selling half truths and reinventing the situation for someone who they are attracted to in order not to shock their potential soul mate or at the very least, to coax their lover into agreeing with their own opinions. If you have to do this, then your problem is not breaking news to someone, your problem is the entire relationship being on unsteady ground.

During one of my favorite moments in the film “Juno”, the father states “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person is going to think the sun shines out your ass. That’s the kind of person worth sticking with.” His statement doesn’t sound romantic at all, but it’s true. Every relationship is going to go through periods of conflict and that is the basis for sharpening each other, making each other better, more loving, and more human than the two of you could be on your own. This is the beauty of a relationship that works.

I’ve often heard it said that lover’s quarrels are the worst kind of verbal fights around, and in many ways, true. That’s how they should be. After all, if you can’t really fight with the person you love the most while understanding that the freedom that tomorrow is another day with new challenges and testing new boundaries of your love for each other, there’s really not much hope of any relationship surviving.

I am unable to wash my hair, there is way too much of it for me to handle. When I went away to college, the major worry of my parents was not that I wouldn’t be able to keep my grades high or wouldn’t have the self-discipline to attend class, no; it was the daily task of taking care of my hair and other minute personal details. At one point I even seriously debated on shaving my head and wearing a wig at all times. However, whenever I visited a wig shop I realized that nobody else’s hair, natural or synthetic, no matter how easy it was to take care of, would ever be my own. For me, I always thought of my hair as my signature. Some women get into shoes, other women handbags. Mine was like Sampson; my hair, a symbol of strength and health; regardless of it throwing me into utter dependence.

It was either fate or providence that when I moved away to college, there was a hair salon directly across the street that was having their grand opening that first week. For four years I visited those hair dressers, talking about my problems and my potential love interests as they washed my hair and pinned it in such a way that it inevitably looked lovely, but also stayed out of my face. And then a week after I graduated, the owner declared bankruptcy and the studio closed.

At university there was a stark contrast between the students and professors always insisting on reading and having intellectual debates and those in any sort of vocational industry. It often turned into outright snobbery. And while the turnover rate of the people employed by a single salon is shockingly high. Often at my own school, people would think that the cosmetologists or other individuals who insisted on going into vocational school rather than receiving a full liberal arts degree were somehow inferior. They couldn’t stick to a single curriculum, they were fickle, gave up easily and that’s why their lives lead them to cosmetology school rather than a prestigious intellectual education such as our own.

Here’s what elitists like liberal arts students miss, and it’s taken me several years, as well as another salon I love equally to bring me to this conclusion. The services of hairdressers and cosmetologists changes as many lives and helps as many people during a time of need as any doctor or psychiatrist. My quality of life is literally improved by individuals who insist that I am taken care of and go out in public in my best possible style.

Many hairdressers and cosmetologists actually spend their weekends in funeral homes attempting to present the dead in a state of great beauty during funeral processions. It’s so that those in mourning can look at the faces of their loved ones now gone and have a permanent final memory of them looking peaceful, serene, and beautiful. Another hairdresser in London spends her Saturdays working with individuals going through chemotherapy; fitting wigs and trimming them into a style that suits each individual patient so that they will not be saddled with embarrassment regarding their hair loss. And as for me, the ability to have my hair out of my face whenever I want, is priceless, as I would otherwise be miserably fighting the constant battle of keeping hair out of my eyes. It also means with an up-do, people take me seriously as a professional, because with my hair up in a bun or braid, I no longer look like I am twelve years old or mentally incompetent. Therefore, strangers actually treat me with more respect, directness when I have my hair styled in a way that flatters me.

Its easy to dismiss the beauty industry and those in it as encouraging vanity. A kind of reverse arrogance sets in assuming that either those involved are also shallow and self serving. But beauty has its value and serves a purpose, that is: to teach us all we are to be valued, not only for how we look, be who we are and what we can do for others as well.

There are a few things in this world that I hate more than church shopping. Truth be told I think I would rather be hung upside down on my toenails than work for a place of worship. Sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of church can often be one of the most excruciating things about being disabled, particularly since everyone wants to lay hands on me in an effort to heal my disability. As a rule, the more traditional the church and the older the church, the more this embarrassing behavior occurs until eventually I feel sorry for the want to be faith healers that their God is so small that he can only work amongst able bodied people.

So when I felt the need to find a church in London I made a deal with God. I prefer to be known as one of Gods more petulant children and I informed him that I would visit one church. God had one shot to impress me with a congregation of church folk to keep me committed to going back every Sunday. If he couldn’t, I wasn’t going back and I would give up going to church for another three years.

When I first lay eyes on the pastor of my now adopted congregation, I was leery to say the least. His button up cardigan, sandy brown hair, and confident smile immediately made me think of past members of congregations who tried to encourage me when I needed not encouragement, thereby providing discouragement or attempted to put God in their own image. I was not repulsed, so I promised that I would come back a second time. By the following Sunday, I did just that and was alarmed when I discovered, without requesting it from anyone, a ramp laid down to cover the single step it took to get into the church building. They saw that a member of their congregation would be helped by providing wheelchair access and unassumingly they immediately did just that. It was the first time a church had ever done such a thing for me.

A few Sundays later the pastor told a sermon which heavily featured his mother who had died a number of years before from motor neuron disease, otherwise known in America as ALS. In the sermon he talked about being a young man and fighting off faith healers with a broomstick to get them to leave his mother alone. For him, the disease was not necessarily something to be healed as it was something that could provide a better understanding to who God is and what life is all about.

To say that something good would come out of something tragic is at best a cliché. Whenever I’m feeling depressed and someone said that God will change my pain into something that would glorify him, I honestly want nothing more than to punch that individual in the face. Sufferers sometimes can’t hear about the great joys which can inevitably come from suffering, nor should that be forced upon them during a time of mourning. When one has just experienced tragedy, it tests first of all an individual’s patience. We feel that we will be sad forever; that life will never move on and we will be forever stuck in mourning. I am sure there were many hours of desperation my pastor felt while watching his mother slip away from him. Being faced with suffering of course, begs us to question things about God and life which we would be more comfortable ignoring.

To say that it was because of his suffering mother that I decided to join my church and become an active member of it would be a underestimate of the rest of the congregation. Truth is, I was attracted to the church not for the charisma of the pastor, but because during my times o visiting no one had attempted to heal me. This proved that the congregation understood that life shouldn’t be simple and rather the value of life is much deeper than our shallow limitations of what it ought to be or ought to look like.

There is something immensely comforting and wonderful about experiencing healing from a person who has once been wounded himself. It means not only do they have a genuine desire to see a condition improve, but that they have also been through the darkest night and know when it is appropriate to cheer you up and when it is more appropriate to just hold you while you are suffering because there is little else that can be done with any amount of sincerity.

“The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak; They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.”

—Edward Shillito in the poem “Jesus of the Scars”

Having someone who has suffered as a confidant and friend as well as a leader means that he knows about the difficult questions which inevitably pop up when one is miserable. With the answers he provides I know that he isn’t simply faking a positive response that the problem will go away on it’s own. When he was a young man, his mother said to me when some able body woman he grew up with and declined into what that was completely dependant on anyone for anything. Having a spiritual leader who knows the way such a life is in the frustration that comes from it, who knows pain and suffering as well as death and joy which are brought out from situations that one would prefer to avoid mean that there is a level of genuineness in the help he offers to give. It also means that he fully knows that this world is not how any of us would like to live it. However, he will tell me whenever I am in the middle of such frustrations due to my own disability now that the pain I feel is just for the time being.

I was brought up with a relatively conservative background for a modern woman. At a young age, we were taught that we were to be careful about relationships we had, particularly amongst those of the opposite sex. We were to prize our bodies and under no circumstances were we to appear unnecessarily scandalous. Later, I revised the last point to add the word “unnecessary” as opposed to simply “scandalous” because after all, sometimes a little bit of scandal was fashionable. Therefore, when I called my mother late last night, I was expecting her to drop the phone on the floor. What I was not expecting was for her to commence laughing so hysterically that it took her a good fifteen minutes of me begging to finally bring her back to some sort of order.

It went like this: Last night my room mate was out of town for a single night and I was home alone. I had instructed a male neighbor of mine who happens to be one of my closest friends here to come over and plug in my electric chair at the end of the evening since I am unable to manipulate the cord by myself. He agreed that he would come by shortly after midnight and I left a key for him to get in. At approximately eleven o’clock, I decided that there is no point in waiting up for someone who is perfectly capable of plugging in an electric wheelchair on their own. So I began to get ready for bed. Shortly thereafter, I was attempting to undress myself and managed to get caught in my own white knit shirt.

Under normal situations, this never would have been a problem. Of course if my room mate were in town she would be helping me with my nightly duties. However, when I awoke that morning and carefully picked out my outfit for the day it came to me that I would be spending the evening alone and thus wanted my garments according to what I could get on and off with my own volition, or so I thought. By the time eleven thirty had rolled around, it was clear to me that because I was so warm from attempting in vain to remove my shirt, that I would never be able to get it off in such a state of panic which I had inevitably worked myself into.

In one last try, I attempted to pull the bottom of the shirt up over my head. This too was unsuccessful, and I had managed to loop the shirt around the back of my neck with my arms still completely in the sleeves. I had now reached a desperate measure and at eleven thirty-five, stuck in a shirt, late at night, I began to call all the female neighbors I could think of.

By the time I attempted to reach the sixth woman on my list, I heard my door unlocking and at that realized that my worst nightmare had indeed come true. I made my way downstairs tangled up in my white collared shirt.

Despite my embarrassment, my friend was more than happy to rescue me from my clothing malfunction. Finally reporting that he actually enjoyed “Rescuing damsels in such deep and disturbing distress.” At which point I raised my hand, forever clenched in that stereotypical quadriplegic fist, and I said “Guess which finger I would like to show you.”

On the one hand it was without a doubt one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. That having been said, there is something that, despite my conservative upbringing and my vain attempts to follow Jesus, I have managed to avoid, a much needed lesson which I needed to learn long before now.

Your best friends are the ones which you will doubtlessly be willing to break all the rules, even the rules of propriety for. Fortunately for me, my neighbor is one of those people who I will not only allow to see me vulnerable, but also see me completely humiliated, sweaty, frustrated, entangled in a shirt which is usually a simple on/off. Despite my embarrassment and the fact that I was on the verge of tears, he looked at me dead in the eye and said, “It’s no big deal. I have helped loads of girls take their shirts off before.”

Thank God for that.

Recently I’ve taken up baking every Saturday morning with my neighbors. They file in with their dishes and types of specialty tea, one of them bringing eggs, another flour, sugar, recipe book. We catch up on the news of the week as we mix and enjoy one another’s company. I am always slightly ashamed when I bring up my “baking club” to people. I’m even more ashamed when I think of the stereotypes of the craft. I do love this time when we bake together. To me it brings up images of 1950s housewives and the pastel icing that is so perfect it screams never to be eaten. I worry now that I appear like one of those domesticated goddesses who seem to know everything about the kitchen and nothing about the real world. I worry that people think that I take my shoes off when I enter my own house.

But in actuality I’m not baking in order to become this feminine ideal or even make beautiful cakes which everyone will love. I don’t bake to become the heroine of the kitchen. I bake because I am learning so much from the experience.

I bake so I can enjoy my neighbors. It’s actually becoming the equivalent of the Saturday morning cartoon watching ritual when I was a kid. The ladies pile in full of ideas and laughter and I am reminded how much I miss them throughout the busy week. We are forced to watch each other and give opinions about the meringue or marriage. Most of the women are older than I, and so hearing them speak and listening to their responses regarding issues that I am currently struggling with is a good comfort. With our Saturday morning ritual comes a dedicated time when we all come together and escape the busy world to get to know each other and what we need in our lives, better. Today in London I don’t know many other opportunities to do exactly that.

I bake because it forces me to make the best of a situation where there is no script. Inevitably something will go wrong; we run out of flour or someone puts in too much milk, the egg yolk won’t separate and it’s our last egg. All of a sudden five women have to put their heads together and figure out what can be done in an effort to counteract impending culinary doom. For once in life the problems are small and we are able to laugh about them. The cake may not rise, despite our best efforts, but we are able to fail in that limited way. While the cake may not look the way it did in the photograph, it still tastes good. Problem solving skills therefore become like a clever game rather than seeming like a rendition of a modern day Sisyphus.

I bake because it truly opens up a world of skills that I was never exposed to growing up. In England, not only do they measure things in grams, but we actually use a balance scale to tell just how many pistachios to put in the macaroons. For the first time in my life I feel exactly what bread dough needs to feel like before it is placed into an oven. In the past, women taught each other these skills in exactly the same way I am learning them now. They would come over and have the community cook a meal; allowing the younger generation to experience all the details required to perfect the meals well before they reached the helm of the kitchen. Most days we choose recipes by Nigella Lawson who is in a matter of speaking, insanely old fashioned; making everyone whip eggs by hand or blanche almonds themselves. But from this crazy insistence on ritual comes clear traditions passed on within the community from woman to young woman so that she is never isolated even when she is stuck in the domestic realm of plainly perfect housewife.

I love Saturday mornings. It’s my favorite part of the week now. Some mornings I can here the laughter from down the road as the women meet up with each other before entering my flat. Ease and perfection isn’t always considered standard, and simple things are really exciting. I will never fit the perfected housewife mode, I don’t want to. I have other dreams and goals for my life so it’s ok when we make lousy mistakes and burn the pavlova. Real people sometimes get to talking so much about life that they forget that the pudding is still in the oven.

When I opened my back door at the sound of his knocking, it was obvious that he came bearing gifts. The presents, sloppily wrapped in brown paper, came as a sort of surprise,  I wasn’t expecting anything from him at all. Instantly the selfish side of my mind takes over.  All I want to know is what he could have brought me? What he could have seen that made him think of me?  So I open the package.  At first I think it’s a joke because it’s a paper cup that has vegetables painted on it with a plastic top. The entire thing weighed no more than a cup of noodles, which I ate back in university. I look at him.

“You bought me a cup of vegetable soup?” He rolls his eyes and tells me to pay better attention. I look again, it’s seeds for a chili plant. The paper cup is full of dirt.

Why even bother to get me anything if you are just going to get me a cup of dirt?  Nothing wrong with the gift, I say, but the fact is I can’t plant seeds. I can barely take care of myself let alone making me responsible for another object, it’s not my idea of a good time. He starts talking excitedly of the chili plants he’s been growing and I am still stuck on receiving a cup of dirt for my birthday.  Doesn’t he know me at all?  Doesn’t he know my limitations of what I can and cannot do? What does he think, after feeding me hundreds of meals, cleaning my flat, fixing broken wheelchairs, and unlocking doors which I didn’t have the physical capability to open, he would know that this present would be more trouble than anything else.

“So are we gonna sit here and keep talking or are we gonna plant these things?” All of a sudden, with massive amounts of dexterity he jumps up and flies over to the kitchen sink, opening the paper cup and the package of seeds, adding water as necessary, and then dumping the seeds out onto the table.

“Your turn”, he says. After a second I look at him blankly. What is he talking about?  What is he doing? He continues to look at me in expectation. “Go on then, I’ll hold the cup, you put the seeds in. They need to be planted about two inches apart….Its not going to spill, I have hold of the cup right here.” I look at him, he has absolutely lost his mind.  Even if I do manage to get these tiny little pepper seeds into a pile of dirt and bury it, the thing is just going to die. I really don’t have the capability of managing any more house plants. When you depend on someone else to get you a drink of water, the plant seemed like a good excuse to start a group called “Planned Planting” to look for alternative homes for the houseplant you’ve been given. The chili seeds are impossible for me to hold on to until I get them on the tip of my finger and I am slowly able to make the seeds stick to my just long enough to be placed on top of the dirt. He poked behind the back of the seeds, pushing them in

“That should do it nicely, I’ll come by in a few days to water and, when it’s time, you and I can repot them. There’s loads of new pots at Tescos. Though, you should get a set now for when they grow bigger. I even have some compost in the back of my boat.”

It wasn’t until he said that that I finally realized what my birthday from him actually was.  All of a sudden I had my very own gardener to help me plant chili plants. He comes back every few days to check up on them and give them water when needed. And, just as I promised, I bought three  pots on sale from Tescos for one pound fifty. This morning when I woke up, I found eight tiny seedlings in a paper cup. Their heads just beginning to raise towards the sun, and immediately I texted him to see if he would come by and have a look. Whenever he comes to give them more water, the value of his birthday present grows exponentially.  He is one of those people who gives up his time freely, making you feel like you are the most important person in the world. And with that comes the astounding ability to give a precious gift that no one else can replicate, regardless of how much money may be thrown or the size of the celebration.

Every morning when I come downstairs, I look at the tiny plants in the paper cup, wondering if they need to be watered for that day. Whenever I start to think that they do, he inevitably comes by with the watering can, ready to make sure that everything in our little paper cup garden is properly cared for. I’ve even started to figure out additional uses for chili’s to see what will come during harvest time. One morning he came in with a new challenge, sunflowers. He wants to see how high he can make one grow inside my two story windows. This time, I didn’t turn my nose up so quickly at his present. I realized that he gave me himself.

A Peaceful Valentine’s Day

Last summer I saw two of my friends get married. In many ways it seemed as though they were already wedded long before they walked down the aisle and said their vows to each other. The second they went on their first date here in London it seemed that they were perfect for each other.

The woman was a friend of mine previously to the couple coming together. One afternoon she came into my flat insisting that over Valentine’s Day weekend, she would make haggis as a sort of rebellion against the overly commercial, sappy, syrupy, sociological dedication towards Valentine’s day. What could be a better rebellion than stuffing a sheep’s intestine full of herbs and spices while listening to punk music then tucking in to enjoy the hard work? So she did what any single, self respecting woman would do to prepare for Valentine’s day, she went to Borough Market and bought a sheep’s gut from the butcher’s. While there she bumped into a young man queuing up for the same ingredients. His version of the perfect Valentine’s day weekend was exactly the same as hers. Three years later they were walking down the aisle.

We were in a world which teaches that people are not fully complete until they have found a mate. This is not only a teaching of all the major religions, but also that of the mass media. Nearly every song one hears on the radio is about love. Every television show goes round and round about romantic interests, breakups, and the inevitable make up sex; as well as the news stories are filled with weddings and gossip about divorces. Romance, we are told, is one thing that everyone always ought to be looking for.

The idea of being a complete person and alone is almost unheard of. Churches and synagogues are full of singles groups where you can meet like-minded individuals of the opposite sex. Even in the modern world where marriage is not necessarily encouraged, it is difficult to be seen as a whole person. Everyone, at the very least, lives together as a couple.

What’s so amazing about my friend’s story is in many ways cliché. Over and over you hear, “It’s when you aren’t looking that you find someone,” and then we try to convince ourselves when we find someone that we are attracted to that we weren’t looking for anyone in the first place. I highly doubt that either of my friends were looking for their future mates when standing in line at a butcher shop, holding a sheep’s intestine. In many ways, that’s what makes their story so special. The fact that both of them, as individuals, were able to stand up to the and insist that a day which everyone else swears up and down was meant for love was actually meant for stuffing a sheep’s stomach and listening to of punk rock. There are two people completely content and confident with how they see themselves as well as refusing to cave in to the expectations of those around them hunting for happiness in another person simply because they are still single.

What makes an individual complete or a full entity is how satisfied they are with themselves, not how they are seen in the eyes of other people. If someone is without a partner, he must believe that he is still complete, not lacking in anybody’s expectation simply because there is no wife to show for it. Anyone who swears otherwise can, well, stuff it as they would a sheep’s gut. 

I can tell that it is him pushing my wheelchair without looking behind me. The way his black gloved hand grabs the push bar sends a surge of confidence through the entire chair. I can feel it in my spine. And then after that shudder comes a feeling of such relief and relaxation that I sit back in my chair a bit more peacefully. I don’t have to look for every crack in the sidewalk, every possible stick my front wheels could get stuck on. My eyes, my mind, my muscles can all rest for a few moments knowing that he has my back and is thinking for both of us.

We dodge in and out of the commuters at London Bridge Station, a fog of air coming out of out mouths giving the only visible sign of exertion. He tells me that people stare at us all the time. I have never noticed, and he has long stopped caring… or maybe he never did to begin with. Our contrast is almost more shocking than the obvious. Me in my white fur hat, him in a battered bomber style one. His coat tattered and grey, I’ve just gotten mine for Christmas, the bright red making me look like a special holiday doll which is never allowed to be played with. Rarely do people comment on the fact we do not look like we belong together. In our circle of friends it’s assumed we can get by in the most chaotic of situations.

Arriving at the elevator we wait alongside mothers with their young children draped in fleece blankets and tucked inside a multitude of layers. The women avoid eye contact with us. He and I are clearly the odd ones out. But the children, even I can see them look at me with as much curiosity as they’ve ever had. This is when my friend’s imagination gets the better of him. He leans over and whispers in my ear.

“It’s almost like they’re saying ‘wow, she has a really big stroller. Maybe if I play my cards right, I won’t ever have to get out of mine.’”

This is why he and I get along so well.

“Going out with you is like going out with the crazy girl,” my friend says on the other end of the line. “No I’m not. I’ve always considered myself more of the girl-next-door type,” I replied. I can’t help but laugh. I had just rescued my chair from a building in the center of London. While attending a class in the basement, the lift had decided that it would be an opportune time to break, trapping me and my wheelchair downstairs. I am fortunate enough to be able to walk up the stairs, but my 400 pound electric wheelchair had to be left overnight. The next morning I received a phone call saying that the lift would be broken for at least three more weeks as new parts had to be ordered. My wheelchair was still stuck within the basement.

Seeing that I needed it to get around London, I immediately called two of my guy friends who are able between them to get the wheelchair out through a secret passageway (I kid you not!) in the building. Apparently, this passageway, kept behind locked doors, was formerly used as a shooting range for the British militia. So through the super-secret, hidden, locked, forbidden passageway the three of us climbed after my wheelchair was taken up three small steps in order to enter. We even had flashlights in tow to make it more dramatic.

To say that trouble follows me is an understatement. Don’t get me wrong, it’s rarely anything I do. But between the collapsing toilets, the broken elevators, and a plethora of dead batteries at very inconvenient times, I am beginning to be known amongst my guy friends as Calamity Jane, someone who is always a damsel in distress. They answer the phone and immediately wonder what sort of sticky situation I have now gotten myself into. The thing is, it’s nothing to do with me. Really, it isn’t. I live as normal of a life as you can imagine. I go up and down stairs using elevators. I accomplish precisely what any able-bodied person does. And it’s not as if I’m trying to scale the walls of Big Ben or create some other mischief. Believe it or not I’ve come to the conclusion that things of this world are not particularly ready for someone in a wheelchair to conquer.

None of my friends realize until I tell them that we live in a world in which disabled people are not expected to go out much. At work they estimate that as much as 75% of disabled people go out of their homes once a week or less. This is the city in which public transportation can be a nightmare for anyone who doesn’t travel on two feet. Services such as Shop Mobility and Dial-A-Ride which as supposed to help individuals with physical disabilities to get around put a strict limit of using their services 6 times a month per person. For me and my career, I’m lucky if I don’t need to go to 6 different places a day. Such restrictions not only prove the point that disabled people are not mobile, it reinforces it, thus creating a cycle that London has yet to break out of. Unless you’re me, and then you run the risk of being trapped in the basement of a building whose lift has just gone out.

I once had a wheelchair vendor come to my house for a yearly tune-up. He was able to plug a computer into my electric chair and get a reading of exactly how far I had traveled in it within the past year and a half. When he saw the mileage, he dropped his computer. “You ride your wheelchair hard. It wasn’t meant to be used this much.” What does he expect? My life has taken me all over the city and actually all over the world. When I buy a wheelchair I expect it to keep up with my way of living, not the other way around.

I am often told by my friends that people still stare at me when we go out together. This actually is news to me as I usually don’t notice. But the fact that seeing someone out in a wheelchair still is a reason for stares, shocks most of my friends as much as it does the other party in seeing me.

I’m not Calamity Jane. I’ve always actually considered myself a girl-next-door type. But the fact that when my number pops up on the phones of my guy friends, they begin to itch, wondering what adventure will come next. And in this way, maybe my friend is right. I guess every neighborhood has one and I’m it. I am the crazy girl-next-door.