Just about everything I do or have done in my life is due to my love for children. Over time, that led to my Just about everything I do or have done in my life is due to my love of children, and over time, that led to my activism and passion for “the underdog”. One of the manifestations of that preoccupation in my early 20’s was to begin working with developmentally and physically challenged kids as part of the Akron School System. I had joined a friend and her mother in helping to lead a Girl Scout troop for the girls at Barrett Elementary that met every other Wednesday, and when the coordinator for the classroom asked if I thought I might like to work with them more regularly, as in, the teachers needed an assistant, and I jumped at the chance. One fun advantage was that I could get to know more of the kids, including the boys in the class, none of whom I’d ever met.
I learned a lot from those kids. The greatest lesson was that I learned to see, talk and relate to them not as “handicapped kids”, but as just kids. The girls liked the Girl Scout stuff-it got them out of their classes every other Wednesday afternoon, after all, and they always loved the camping adventure we planned each spring. And it was truly an adventure…each of us “big sisters” was assigned a “little sis” to hang out with for the week; and we were to attend to all of all the mobility issues our little sis had (including getting wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, braces, etc. into and out of the cabin, setting them up at the long wooden picnic tables down the center for meals and crafts, and finally, get the girls into bed at the end of the day…without killing them or creating more problems for them) We also were charged with any food issues the girls might have; (several were unable to feed themselves due to “uncooperative limbs”, (their term, not mine) some had feeding tubes, some had dietary restrictions); as well as hygiene issues (some were in diapers, some had ostomy bags, some just needed help getting from wheelchair to toilet).
My first year at camp, my little sis was a girl named Kelly, and was the maiden voyage into the splendor of camping for both of us. She was a child born with a particularly unreasonable number of disabilities. Born with spina bifida, she would never walk, was hydrocephalic, nearly blind, nearly deaf, with clubbed feet and tiny webbed fingers. She spoke with the quiet of someone without enough breath to be loud. She was 13 years old, and had the sharpest, funniest sense of humor I’d ever known in a kid-any kid. At the end of that first trip, we laughed at the miracle it was that I hadn’t managed to kill her during our week together. She’d had to instruct me in most of the ways she needed help, and scolded me when I couldn’t do it right. The next spring she was no longer in diapers but had an ostomy bag, which she teased would be the way I would finally be able to kill her off, because she was sure that I had forgotten everything she taught me the year before.
I know people probably used to use the term “retarded” when they saw kids like her, but I never associated that kind of label with them. Because the accepted definition for that word just did not apply to those girls. Over the course of three years, we talked with them about how they saw themselves, and how they thought others thought of them, what they wanted to be when they grew up, just like I did with my baby sister. Those discussions occasionally led to us talking about that particular word. It was astonishing to learn that the word meant very little to them. We talked about it a few times, and by the end of that third year, they had taught us that they never thought of themselves as dumb, or stupid, or “retarded”. The kids used the word themselves, though, to describe people who were mean, who did stupid things or, the worst- people who tried to hurt other people. They never thought of themselves as “retarded” because they were not mean, and never tried to hurt anyone else, even if they did some dumb things sometimes.
Of course I’m glad that the word has become obsolete. I still haven’t used it, but for my last essay, but in the personal little dictionary that I keep in my head, the definition is still the one that came from Kelly, Stacy, Dao, Beth, Holly and the rest of the kids I love to this day.
I tell this story as a very convoluted way to explain and apologize for an awkward thing I wrote yesterday on Facebook. Unfortunately, it turns out that even with my incredibly proficient capacity for swearing as well as any old stevedore, over the course of the past two years, I have used so many of my favorite four letter words when talking and writing about the mob in DC, none of those words had the passionate impact I needed at that moment. So the search was on for the worst, most insulting, most hateful word I could find to describe that feeling at that moment.
Thats when I found the word “retarded”. I know that my beautiful, wonderful special needs kids were probably insulted with that ugly slur in their lifetimes, whether they were aware of it or not, and it hurts to think of it. And I’m pretty sure I know that even in the more enlightened age in which we live now, more than 30 years beyond my life with those kids, people still use that term as a slur. In every context, it is a hurtful, ignorant, and evocative term. Its what I wanted.
It’s not an excuse, really. It was a mistake to assign such a word a meaning that society doesn’t share. I’ve hurt and disappointed (and confused, I think) those of you who know me and know that even in the heat of a political tirade I don’t normally call names, I don’t lie, and I have faith that enough people working hard enough can overcome even the likes of Donald J. Trump. And Ill make you a promise….I don’t know if I ever have used the word, and I hate it too! That word will not come from me again. Not in speech, not in print. What I ended up doing was fighting down to Dumpy’s level, and god, what a terrible place to live.
Gramalibby53's Blog 