I got my hair chopped off today. I'll show you a picture later on, I left the dig cam at D's apartment. I don't love it. I don't think it is the most flattering haircut I've ever gotten, but I don't really care because my goal was not to love it. My goal was to meet my minimum daily requirement of daily hygiene, which is "At the very least, be clean and neat." I can't always be my usual stunningly beautiful picture of femininity. Especially since children. Ever tried taking a shower with two little boys pounding on the shower walls and taking all your tampons out of the closet and throwing them in the tub? (If you tell me to shut the door and leave them outside, you've never known the dangers of two 15 month olds who can get themselves stuck in a baby gate in under 15 seconds.) But wet hair in ponytail was not meeting my minimum daily hygiene requirement. And short, short boyish hair is. So. I like it for now. It'll probably last six months to a year before I say that I'm growing it out.
I'm also hoping that this will make it easier for me to work out at my gym. I really need to do this for several reasons. First, because I am an athlete. I'm not saying I'm a great athlete. But I've always been the sort of sporty type (as long as it didn't involve sports with round objects hurled in my general direction), and I don't feel good unless I'm involved in something physical on a regular basis. Second, I'm overweight. And my pregnancy excuse (which really isn't that much of an excuse) doesn't work anymore. The kids are sleeping through the night. Near walking. Eating at normal human intervals. It's time to get back to doing some things for me. Which brings me to thirdly, I need a break from these kids sometimes. There is no husband or babysitter or grandparents to take them even for an hour or so. It is me and kids 24/7. I feed them every meal, I change every diaper, I give every bath, I read every book. With the exception of the church nursery. Its all me, all the time. I get a two hour maximum a day of cheap daycare at my gym. And I want my two hours, even if it means I'm slugging it out on a treadmill. I wanna sweat. And sweat without children crawling all over me as the cause.
For the record, I was planning all this before the following occurred. But check out the following:
I check my blog stats this evening, and I find that hundreds of people have linked to my site from a Michelle Kwan Message Board and a board called Figure Skating Universe. My post about figure skating has been picked up and making its way around these boards. (Which means if she hasn't already, my sister has now found my site. So, Hello! Sister!). So I click through to the messages about my post, and I find this:
I got to be honest about this......
In general I have nothing but admiration for people who over-come adversities, on big scale or personal level, and follow their dreams and desires. My favorite b-day wish that comes from the heart to all my friends "I will not wish you my wishes or what is standrad to wish for a b-day, may your own wishes and dreams come true, and you don't even have to announce them".
But with all this respect and admiration for her accomplishments and "we shall overcome"...... I DON'T NEED TO SEE HER FAT WHITE LEGS!
Why is she posting these fotos? She had a visual imperiment...... She does not see them as clearly as we do....... So why is she puttin it in public's face? We're all intelligent enough to imagine what shape a body can take for a person in her situation.... Do we need to "see it"?
We don't! This is just her own self-gratification, as in "come in roll in the same shit i roll in". This is a very common tactic for "les miserables"..... but it's not a fair one to regular people.
I don't quite get the need for the "blogs" and "live journals" and "my-space"..... Don't these people have friends and relatives they can speak with and talk to? (and show them "anatomy fotos" and share "emotions"?).
I love her story, but I don't need the "grotesque" of her condition in details and fotos..... (my great uncle has a tatoo from A-witch, no slightly disabled woman strugling to figure-skate will top that).
I was at a party few days ago, and a very wonderful (in all aspects) woman, who had a breast cancer, decided to "show" the result of her condition. She opened her shirt to a bunch of us, and displayed the section where her breast was removed....... Bon appetit!
I can relate to any such story..... I don't need grotesque. I know what the "stuff" looks like, breast cancer, body going out of shape as a result of an injury..... I don't need to see it.
To which I reply (although I probably should have let it go, but y'all know I can't let things go):
Oh, I know I shouldn't reply to this, but...Hi! It's me! The one who wrote that post on my blog. I actually do read this message board sometimes, and logged in special today, just for Tinami.(sp?) I was looking at my blog stats and found quite a few links from here so came and checked it out and about did a spit-take with my tea when I read about my Fat White Legs! Yeesh! I'm not actually that offended (well, maybe just a little...sniff, sniff.) But wanted to just say this:
The picture was meant to be kind of Mary Katherine Gallagher geeky. Here I was prancing around in a nightshirt and skates on carpet at 1 in the morning. I'm admittedly a geeky kinda girl. I'm a part Irish girl from Oregon, so we are white, white, white but at least we don't get as much skin cancer here. Also, despite being blind, I have a pretty realistic body image. I am 5'5" and a good, live-able weight for me is about 135 and I need to lose about 30 pounds so you do the math. So I freely admit that I'm a bit overweight right now.
But all that is neither here nor there. What I found really strange about Tinami's comment was that she attributed my white fat legs to being blind. As if they were somehow grotesquely deformed due to the fact that blindness contorts your body in some abnormal way that doesn't affect "regular people" like her. Hey, I have the same problem as millions of women. I am 35 years old. I am the mother of one year old twins. I gained weight during my pregnancy, and then when the twins came I did not eat as well as I should have and did not exercise as much as I should have. I have not lost my pregnancy weight yet, and I have no excuse but that I'm just a busy mom who hasn't integrated enough good nutrition and exercise into her schedule yet. Happens to many of us.
Blindness actually made me more fit, as I walked an awful lot since I don't drive. Often I walked between three to six miles a day running back and forth to stores and work and bus stops. Also, as I said, I have not been able to skate since I have been pregnant. I hope to get back into it a bit when the kids are a little older.
My point is, I may not have killer model legs, but I am not showing off a grotesque deformity that came about because of my disability. Give me a break! This Tinami person must be very insecure and be very bigoted against disabled people.
There is no "les miserables" or roll in my unfortunateness or whatever she said. I'm basically a happy mom of two who is a skating fan and sometimes recreational skater. This must be some kind of misery that she is projecting from her own life.
I thank everyone who said nice things about me and the post. I wrote it to show that joy of skating goes beyond gold medals and to share my personal experiences and love for it. If you've ever thought about skating as an adult but were inhibited by all the cute little eight year olds doing double jumps, there is a wealth of opportunities for adults to have fun as well. Most rinks have an adult group, you just have to find the right day and time that they show up. So even if you have fat white legs like me, put on a pair of sweats and skates and go have fun. Who cares what people like Tinami think?
And, btw, I'd probably be the one showing off my lumpectomy too, if I had cancer. There is nothing ugly or grotesque about surviving cancer.
Back to occasionally lurking now!
So, to be clear, I'm not so much upset that she said my legs were white and fat. I knew it was not a very complimentary picture of my legs but really wasn't hung up on portraying myself to be perfect at every angle. I'm upset that she related it so strongly to her discomfort about disability. If she saw the same picture, but didn't know I was disabled, what would she have seen. Maybe she just would have said, "Dude! Nice fat white legs!" and left it at that. Or she might have not said anything. This is an example (although not the most severe or extreme example) of disability animus.
Animus is a legal term meaning, basically, hate. It is important in discrimination cases because many times the defense is that "I just didn't know any better. I'm just ignorant." If you can prove Animus, or the intentional discrimination of a particular group due to disdain or hate for that group, you can win your case. Disability cases are very hard to prove because there is this perception that "no one is against the disabled. No one hates them, we just don't know any better."
Many people do have good intentions toward people with disabilities and do or say stupid things because they don't know any better and are open to learning to be more accepting. Then there are people who are stealth discriminators. Clint Eastwood comes to mind, here. These are people who are very polite and don't say anything against the disabled and claim ignorance, but they claim it again and again and again for years and years. They are choosing to be ignorant. They are purposefully avoiding becoming educated because secretly, they hold animus and disdain towards a particular group. In Eastwood's case, he failed to provide accessible entrances to his California resort hotels. The first time he was sited, he said he didn't know the law applied to his hotels because he didn't think anyone in a wheelchair would ever come to his resorts. (Good way to get them not to come is to not let them in the front door.) The next several times he was sited, he said he didn't know. He was sued, and lost. Then, he went to Congress with a bill that would allow businesses a 90 day grace period to become accessible if a disability person filed a claim against them. The problem there is that the laws have been in effect for 16 years now. Businesses already had a two year grace period to get accessible. If a disabled person is denied access because a business hasn't implemented 16 year old codes, why should the business get an additional 90 days? The crime has already been committed. Its like giving a 90 day grace period to a shoplifter to bring back the product whenever they get around to it. Or, if someone was injured in a fire because a business didn't follow the fire codes, don't compensate the victim, just give the business 90 days to comply with the fire codes. Anyway, then there was that whole "Million Dollar Baby" movie which pissed everyone off because he killed off a quad...but I digress.
Anyway, then there is outright hatred that disabled people are subjected to on a daily basis. This is many times based on appearances. Contrary to what the above troll might think, I usually get off on this one because I 'pass' many times as nondisabled. But I've been with many people who didn't meet the glossy vogue pages of body image, and the abuse they take is sometimes very severe and very frequent.
I used to have a boss with cerebral palsy. He used a wheelchair, had slurred speech, and could not feed himself. Part of my job was to assist him on business trips. He had a Ph.D. He had been called "the Grandfather of Self-determination," and worked in Washington with some higher ups in the Department of Health and Human services. He had a pretty likable personality (even though he often got on my nerves.) And he was not a bad looking guy. He looked like he had CP is all.
I can't tell you the amount of abuse this guy took from strangers in airports and at restaurants. People would call out to him that he was a 'retard' and would say things like 'If you can't walk on the plane like a normal person, you shouldn't be riding, you fucking crip." Once I was asked to remove him from a restaurant because he was 'really disturbing to the other customers who couldn't enjoy their meal because they were nauseated by the sight of him." I always called him Dr. X in public, or professor. "Can he have more tea?" says the waitress. "I don't know. Dr. X, she doesn't seem to know how to ask you if you want more tea," I would say.
Another time I was in our nation's capital with a group of leaders from a self-advocacy group for people with cognitive disabilities. This one guy wanted to stop in a convenience store and pick up some magazines. He had a Down syndrome look about him, but was perfectly able to communicate on his own. I was not babysitting him. I was just there. I wasn't paying any attention when I heard, "You f-ing retard! You can't buy all these n*de magazines! Whose responsible for you? HEY!! Whose here with the retard? Come get this guy somebody!" So I walk over there, with my guide dog and I'm like, "I'm not responsible for him, but is there a problem?" And he said this: "Aww, shit! What are you? Blind? Isn't there anyone normal in here with this guy? He can't buy all these magazines! That's sick!" (It turns out, the guy was buying a bunch of pl*yb*y's for some friends of his that were living in a group home and didn't want to buy the mags with their female PCA.) I said that he has every right to buy them and did he make judgments and refuse every customer that came in to buy those particular magazines? This guy told me something to the effect that I should f*ck his retard ass since I couldn't see him anyway, and then some other guy customers started laughing and joining in. At that point, we decided to leave because we no longer felt safe.
This incident was pretty hideous and severe, but not uncommon. I sometimes am glad that D is such an introvert and has mostly managed to work at home because he has been spared a lot of the stuff that I have witnessed others with disabilities endure. People have asked me to not bring him to social functions because he looks too disabled (and again, I've been 'lucky' enough not to 'look blind'".) It cramps their precious clubbing style. Of course, that pretty much ruins that social contact for me as well.
Again, most people are not like this. But it happens often enough to make you fear for your safety, suspicious of how strangers are going to react, and cautious in all of your social dealings. Many times people with developmental disabilities are not given the opportunity to live independently because of this issue. The developmentally disabled are especially vulnerable to violent crime. We look at this as if something is wrong with them, but we really should be looking at this as something is wrong with society.
I truly believe that one of the greatest motivators that keeps institutionalization healthy and thriving, despite its higher costs, is because of hatred for disabled people. People don't want to look at them, they don't want to see what they consider the ugliness, the grotesqueness of the disabled body or mind. They want disabled people out of their sight. I think it is interesting that a society that has desensitized itself to graphic violence to the point that it is sought after and an accepted form of entertainment can find innocent valuable people to be so repulsive that they need to be imprisoned.
The magazine, "New Mobility" has an issue that comes out every February called "Sex, Wheels, and Relationships" that is about disability and sexuality. Every year they have partially nude disabled people on the cover. (The nudity is no worse than say, Demi Moore or Britney Spears on Vanity Fair covers. See this article for this year's cover shot.) Every year, they get so many protests from newsstand owners and other vendors that they've had to wrap that issue in a discrete cover.
The disabled are not allowed to show affection or sexual desire, not allowed to eat in restaurants where we will cause the other patrons to become ill at the sight of us, not allowed to buy sexually explicit magazines or even think of sex, and god forbid, not allowed to show a little leg.
hmmm...
I thought your legs looked all skate-muscley.
What a bitch that woman is though. I think you should have edited out all the "but I had twins, and I admit I'm overweight" and cut straight to the "she's a bigot" chase.
Because THAT was really the point.
Posted by: shannon | March 08, 2006 at 09:15 PM
I had to go back to check out the leg picture again - must admit, they look better than mine - and I am 8 YEARS post partum. Heh. Awesome response!
Posted by: Amy T | March 09, 2006 at 01:39 PM