We express ourselves for many reasons. To persuade, defend, entertain, empower and in many cases, we write, just because we can. Expression is part of our ‘constitutional rights’ in the U.S. People enjoy protection of those rights, or writes.
My childhood was very functional and that means I was very adaptive. I could see this relative’s point about unions and that one’s point about toilet taxes and when the conversation called for it, I could sit on the fence with the best of them.
I don’t see the world in black and white, good and evil, hot and cold or high and low. I do have integrity and stick by what I think is right and just. As long as I don’t have to compromise my own ethics I can be persuaded and even bullied into falling on one side of the fence or the other.
I was still in high school when the parents of a young man I was seeing insisted on him making a choice between me or his car. For his own good, they advised him against mixing up the family’s gene pool. The car won.
When I was expecting my second baby, a friend’s mother suggested I had no right to bring what very well might be a defective baby into the world. For her, this was okay, for me, this advice came too late and would have fallen on deaf ears anyway.
Around Christmas time a woman stopped me in Wal-mart to inquire about my children. She lamented her son’s choice to marry a woman with a disability. She went on about how unfair it is for her son to not only have the burden of caring for his wife, but the excess energy of taking care of a child with an unrelated disability. She wanted to verify that my children were ‘normal.’
I am shocked and appalled when these things happen to me with regularity.
I am a member of an online ‘support’ group for parents and children who share my genetic anomaly. When one of the parents suggested the reproductive side effects of a treatment being given to her child hardly mattered because her little girl had a 50/50 chance of passing the disability on to her babies, got my dander up.
I was offended. Deeply offended and I said so to the group. I was not trying to persuade, or defend or entertain. I wasn’t asking anyone to fall off the fence or change the way they thought. I just wanted them to be aware that I was out there, a member of a support group that seemed to be devaluing me.
I was appalled and flabbergasted to find out that my offence had offended the group. I needed a fire extinguisher to put out the flames in my email box. I have to add that in my personal email a fair number of people consoled me and shared my offendedness.
I am not aiming to convince anyone that my choices were right or wrong. I do know I didn’t violate my own integrity when I made these choices. After this week of ‘support’ from a community who share similar challenges, I have come to appreciate the trials and tribulations the Deaf Community and the Little People are going through in their quests for reproductive choice.
This is my longest blog post, to date, and it comes fairly close to a rant and I wrote it because I felt like enjoying a constitutional right or write. If you comment, please don’t bring a torch. Sit on the fence if that is more comfortable, I know I’ve climbed back up on mine.
There are a few disability links in the right column of this page if you are feeling inquisitive.
Comments
One response to “High Fences and Constitutional Writes”
Yes we have choices, they are our choices and people who judge our choices do not walk in our shoes. If they did their choices would also be different because we are all individuals.
My defining moments have turned into a book – Conversations with Teddy – these defining moments are only my childhood with was not “very functional” like yours but totally dysfunctional but that made me very adaptive and aware of making better choices with my children.