The Gift of the Continuum of Services Part IV: Self-Sufficiency

As the oldest child in a single-parent household, my mother relied on me to babysit, cook, and clean while she worked multiple jobs. Mom, who could be Martha Stewart’s long-lost twin, had an exacting standard for managing household demands. As such, she constantly critiqued my work, providing a barrage of suggestions. Blindness was never an excuse, and there was no chore from which I was exempted. While Mom was a thorough teacher, it was up to me to figure out adaptations. By making me go back and re-vacuum an area where I missed debris, I figured out on my own that it was more effective to vacuum barefoot so that I could feel any residual dirt and to vacuum in a systematic manner with overlapping swipes to make sure that I did not miss any areas.

When it came to meal preparation, my mother eyeballed ingredients and estimated cooking times and temperatures, which in my early culinary attempts resulted in marginally edible meals that were improperly seasoned and either raw or burnt. Because I spent years in the kitchen helping prepare meals long before I had to cook them independently, I was able to gather information about how different meats looked, sounded, smelled, and felt when they were done. I also learned to carefully measure ingredients and to adjust seasonings in small steps. Once I started cooking independently, I learned to use recipes as guides, organize my workspace in advance, pre-measure ingredients, cook at lower temperatures, and use tactile cues to make sure that slice thickness and ingredients are uniformly distributed. The pinnacle of my success was teaching myself how to make pie crusts from scratch and re-creating my great grandmother’s long-lost divinity recipe; feats Ma Stewart never mastered herself. 

As a result of these skills, I was able to procure early, paid-employment experiences as a babysitter. Granted, this was a difficult sell to some parents, but luckily, I had earned numerous endorsements from my young clients. The kids loved that I was an interactive babysitter, which I had to be in order to adequately monitor their safety.

While I was the caretaker of my younger siblings at home, they were inappropriately assigned to be my caretaker when we were out in the community. It was expected that they verbally warn me of environmental obstacles, particularly changes in elevation, and let me know when it was safe to cross the street. On those rare occasions I was allowed out and about by myself, I had several close encounters with traffic and was always being chastised for not paying attention. Not knowing that independent travel was possible for pedestrians with limited or no vision, I grew up mistakenly believing that I would be chauffeured around my whole life by either a professional driver, my husband, my family, or taxis as a last resort. The bus was not even an option in my inexperienced eye nor that of my protective family. In fact, my mother assumed that I would have to either live with her or live down the street from her my whole life. Ironically, it was a blessing that my mother and I fought like cats and dogs during my teenage years because that gave me the determination to figure out how I was going to live far away on my very own. Never would I have imagined that I would become the only single woman in my family to move to states where I knew no one or that I would travel (solo) more extensively than most everyone else in my family.

In spite of being highly self-sufficient, it was not until I studied to be a TSVI and a COMS that I finally became receptive to all the adaptive techniques and tools designed to make my life much easier. (In all fairness, my dedicated TSVI/COMS tried her hardest to get me to use my devices, but she had one of the most stubborn students ever. Ironically, my stubborness is both a blessing and a curse.) If only I had learned to use a long lighter to light a gas stove, I could have saved my bangs from getting singed because my face was too close to the pilot light. Likewise, I could have saved myself a bike accident or two if I had only known about tandem bicycles or adult tricycles. Moreover, I could have skied with my family instead of sitting in the lodge reading a book if I had only participated in the state’s adapted ski program for the blind. Perhaps if I had attended the school for the blind, I could have followed in my mother’s footsteps and been a competitive swimmer, track star, and head cheerleader. Who knows, I might have even been a champion goalball player. (Goalball is somewhat like an adapted version of dodgeball where blindfolded players use their body to block a rolling ball hurled by the opposing team in an attempt to get the ball into the goal.)