Category Archives: Disability

Happy World CP Day!!

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*Some websites are telling me this is the 5th October every year, others are saying 6th. I will be observing it on both days by eating copious amounts of chocolate*

Hey everyone, happy World Cerebral Palsy Day!

I wasn’t going to bother writing a blog in honour of this special day because I don’t want to get too repetitive (okay I know that ship has sailed but I did write a blog on it last year), but when I read last year’s (god-awful) blog entry I realised that I’d written it on the assumption that all of you actually knew what Cerebral Palsy was. For those of you who don’t know me, Cerebral Palsy is what puts the ‘wobbly’ into wobbly-yummy-mummy. There’s a wealth of information about the disability around the interweb, but why would you bother with that when I, an actual person with CP (and therefore an expert) can teach you everything you need to know?

So…

  • Cerebral (brain) Palsy (paralysis) is caused by a lack of oxygen or a head trauma either shortly before, during or shortly after birth. Which is a bit of a pain when you think about it, because your brain controls everything your body does. So, for example, when your non-CP brain says ‘Pick up that cup,’ your hand grabs the handle and voila. Whereas a CPer could do anything from grabbing the cup to going into spasm and hurling it across the table. It’s this unpredictability that makes life that little bit more interesting.
  • It’s estimated that people with Cerebral Palsy use at least twice the amount of energy ‘normies’ use basic things (the perfect excuse, in my opinion, to laze around with chocolate in the evenings). As I’m typing this right now, my involuntary movements are in overdrive: my head is bobbing, my legs are moving – neither body part are needed for the act of typing.
  • Also, every person with CP uses their body in different ways. Unfortunately this can accelerate wear and tear, but there’s sweet FA we can do about it. For example, I’m unsteady on my feet but I find that if I do things on my knees I can do a better job at things like hoovering and folding laundry. I often get swollen knees, something I never got in my teens (I also did my homework at my bed, on my knees). I also fall a lot on my knees. My poor auld knees. I also know people who type with their tongues, elbows and feet a la Christy Brown. We are resourceful folk.
  • Cerebral Palsy is characterised by the presence of many things, including unsteady gait, speech impairment, involuntary movements, poor coordination and so on. But in my experience, it doesn’t affect any two people in the exact same way. I’ve yet to meet a fellow CPer whose impairment is an exact mirror image of mine. A few people may have moderate to severe intellectual impairments, but this is not always the case. A speech impairment is not an indicator of poor intelligence.
  • One thing that I’ve learned about CP that you won’t find on Wikipedia is that some of us (as in myself and at least five other CPers I know) are prone to bouts of uncontrollable giggling. Which on the whole is hilarious but also completely involuntary. If I had been any other student in my sixth year English class I would’ve been suspended for my ‘disruptive’ behaviour in class. My CP friend had similar experiences in college where her giggling disrupted whole lectures and frequently set off waves of giggling in lectures.
  • The following point is not only related to people with Cerebral Palsy but to all people with disabilities: cinematic depictions of people with CP should be portrayed by disabled actors and not Hollywood names ‘cripping up’ for roles. I mean, would you find it acceptable for somebody to paint themselves a lovely brown colour for a role? No, you’d call it racist, and rightly so! I bring up this point after meeting an actor with CP a couple of weeks ago who, for obvious reasons, only gets called to fill the roles of disabled characters. It seems that ‘cripping up’ for roles has now become normalised (look at Me Before You: a disabled character has the lead role, but is played by a non-disabled actor.) It’s not as if there’s a plethora of work out there for disabled actors, so let us represent ‘our people’ when we can!
  • Finally, people with CP are just that – people. Some are nice, some are assholes. Most importantly, we are definitely not inspirational purely in the act of having CP. In fact, comedienne and writer Francesca Martinez (who, if you look her up on YouTube, will tell you even more interesting gaffes about having CP) renounces the label of ‘inspirational’ by saying she spends eleven hours a day in bed (lucky sod). We are not all the same, and don’t they say that variety is the spice of life?!

Phew, that’s a reasonably long blog. I’m exhausted from my involuntary workout. Off to eat chocolate. For energy purposes, of course.

A Future Within Us

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I lay on the hard, unmade bed that I hadn’t really been able to sleep in the night before, and closed my eyes, trying to drown out the medley of Dublin city traffic below me: the deep hum of the Dublin buses, the screeching of random sirens, the faint echo of heavy footfall. Noises that were once so familiar to me ten years ago, as I lay on my overly-narrow single bed in Botany Bay in Trinity College. It should’ve felt like home, and yet, never have I felt so out of place.

I shouldn’t have been lying in bed at half three in the afternoon on such a momentous day as the 23rd September, 2017, a day that I worked so hard towards for the guts of a year. I had left my colleagues behind in the  Mansion House to celebrate the lives of those who had established the Independent Living Movement. An event that I had put everything I had into, turning down paying jobs and little tidbits of work during the summer in the process. I wanted to give all my energy to this event.

Two hours beforehand, I’d tackled one of the things on my bucket list: I performed a piece of drama that I’d co-written in front of two hundred people. As I climbed the stage, I thought I could feel a brick beneath my posterior, I was so nervous. I felt overwhelmed with emotion as I played ‘Rachel’ out on stage, a disabled mother struggling to escape the negative labels placed upon her by an indifferent society. The only way I can describe the experience is ’emotional nakedness’. The tears – and the anger – were evidently mine, not Rachel’s. I couldn’t have dreamed of the positive feedback, and yet afterwards, I wasn’t elated – I was physically sick.

Afterwards, I told myself that it was stress. I panicked because I was filled with fear that I’d pushed it a little too far this time, that once again I had seriously overestimated my physical stamina and taken on too much. But it wasn’t that at all. And it’s only this morning when I feel semi-normal again that I realise when I’ve felt that particular sensation before – the feeling of darkness, heaviness in the pit of my stomach – and it was when my mother died.

Or more specifically, the moment of realisation that she wouldn’t be around for me any more and, as a fully-fledged adult (I was twenty-five when she died) I would now have to shoulder a lot more responsibility for my own life.

It’s easier to be a sheep than a shepherd, easier to follow than to lead. Many of us have followed for years. When Martin Naughton died last year, it felt like the bedrock of the disability activism world was slowly starting to wear away. You could always count on the seven activists that ‘By Us With Us’ honoured on Saturday to lead the way. to spearhead the protests, the fight. Who can we look up to now?

And then it occurred to me that although an intimate knowledge of past successes in disability activism are crucial, we need to trust ourselves and have real belief in our own ability to pave the way to the future. By the way, this nugget of wisdom is coming from someone who has absolutely zero self-confidence and who is still learning to assert her right to use her own voice, the result of years of internalised oppression and being underestimated by those around her.

It’s taken me three days to recover from the emotional rollercoaster that was Saturday (even though I missed most of it) and to get my head around the fact that although the pressure is off in many ways, there is still lots of work waiting in the future. And we – not anyone else – will have to be the ones to put ourselves forward. One of the things that I did manage to gather on Saturday is that there is a general consensus that society is now going backwards, and that the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities will not guarantee us our liberties.

That  will depend on us. On every single one of us.

Legacies

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Today, as my husband slinked into the sitting room to eat his dinner in peace, something unusual happened. Within thirty seconds he’d come back out into the kitchen and said in a casual tone certainly unfitting to the matter at hand, ‘There’s a bird flying around the sitting room.’

I closed my eyes as I imagined our black leather couch now covered in those trademark yellow and white stains. ‘You’re not bloody serious?’

‘Afraid so. We shouldn’t have left the front door open.’

Now, if you asked me if I was afraid of birds, I’d normally say no. But you’d need to contextualise. For example, I have no problem watching autumn migrations or gatherings of birds in the garden. Hell, because my daughter is a nature fanatic, I often have to follow them around the park, driving my wheelchair as slowly as possible so that it doesn’t ‘click’ and frighten them away. But the thought of one trapped in our sitting room, flying frantically, trying to escape, filled me with trepidation.

Walking softly towards the sitting room I peered in to see a little robin, with a fiercely red breast, casually exploring our sitting room. My husband and I looked at each other and smiled slightly, and I recognised something in him I wasn’t expecting, a softness. Normally, we would both be sort of like get that bird out of our sitting room before he shites everywhere, but this was different.  It felt like a presence, like an unexpected but welcome visitor. One of our mothers, perhaps, or Maisie, my mum’s friend who, before she closed her eyes for the last time just two months ago, gave me a green card with a little redbreast robin on it. The card simply read Thinking of You.

‘We have to guide him out, before he has a heart attack,’ my husband finally conceded, before gently herding him towards the front door and closing it.

For the superstitious among you, I’m sure you know that a robin is meant to represent a loved one since passed, and its presence symbolises that he/she is thinking of you, that he or she is near. For me, however, robins represent childhood innocence, dependability. Growing up, we had a conservatory at home and one morning, a little robin hopped in through the open doors while we all watched silently. He explored a little, he sang and he left. Soon, that same robin (or so we liked to think at least) came back every morning, let himself into the conservatory and made himself at home. It became routine, a ritual, and when I saw that robin this evening I was instantly reminded of it.

That association with robins is a legacy left to me by my parents. It’s funny how, even though that era is now gone, I remember not so much the robin, but how I felt when we all saw it for the first time, over twenty years ago. The wonder. The quiet respect.

I’ve been thinking about legacies lately, not least because on Saturday, over two hundred activists will come together in Mansion House to remember the influence that disability activists, both past and present, have had over our lives. That space will allow us to reflect on the achievements of the past, and to be thankful for what has been achieved in the name of people with disabilities thus far. But it’s also an acknowledgement that once Saturday’s event is over, we need to continue looking forward, keep striving towards true equality, ensure that our voices are always heard.

Like the robin from my childhood, some of us thought that these people were invincible, that no matter what, they would always be there. My memories of those who I will be remembering on Saturday are sometimes the only fuel that keeps me involved in activism. Sooner or later, we are going to have to look at the future, and it can be scary when someone we looked up to, be that a parent or sibling in the literal or figurative sense, is no longer here to guide us.

When it seems that all the greatness of the world is slowly disappearing, will we be able to find the courage to look within ourselves. to see what we can offer? And if we can’t trust ourselves to do this, who can we trust to educate our legacies to our children? That’s why we need to tell them about the past, the robin. We all need to know where we came from.

And sometimes we need a reminder, so that we may create meaningful legacies for them. We need to remember the past, not to live in it, but rather to use it as a blueprint to make our own mark in history.

 

 

 

 

 

Take Care of Yourself

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It’s something that we all say to each other, almost like a cliché, at the end of phone calls or when bidding each other adieu when meeting face-to-face: ‘Take care of yourself’. We say it because we care about the other person, and yet we don’t always follow our own advice.

Correction: that should read, I don’t follow my own advice.

As long as I can remember, I’ve always been crap at looking after myself. And before you go off ringing social services, this never has impacted on my ability to look after my daughter; she’s never gone without. But somewhere along the way I seem to acquired the message that my needs aren’t as important as the needs of others. Perhaps it’s a result of internalised oppression (something I’ve been researching lately for the novel I’m writing), the result of growing up in a world where disability is some sort of ‘other’, a deviation from the norm.

Perhaps I need to re-evaluate what I can realistically achieve. I say that I’m writing a novel, but in truth, I don’t know if I’ll ever get it finished. A friend read what I’ve done so far and gave some great constructive feedback, but warned me what I already knew: that it may be difficult to publish and even more difficult to sell. I’m starting to wonder whether I should’ve stuck to short stories, started small. I’m trying to decide whether I’m in over my head. (He didn’t criticise the story though, which gives me hope).

This feeling of tiredness coincides with the fact that I’m waiting for four new (solid this time) tyres for my wheelchair, as one is quite badly flat. And to be honest, reader, I feel very hard done by this. I like being able to whizz around town from this shop to that, and still have the energy to write rubbish blogs and do other work, and being housebound does not become me. As I said in an earlier blog, the wheelchair has been an invaluable addition to my life. It offers me independence with my daughter and enables me to be both a mother and a writer.

I’m writing this  blog to inform my loyal followers that I probably won’t be around for a few weeks as I’m off, with the help of some great friends, to try and reactivate the entire Independent Living Movement (although if I get the wheelchair back, I’ll have energy to spare!) And to say thank you all for being so amazingly supportive of my ‘writing career’ and for your lovely comments.

That’s it for now. See you soon! Until then, take care of yourselves. I’m off to veg in front of the telly before another hectic week of trying to make a difference, however small, in the world.

 

Man, I feel like a writer…

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I am writing this blog today in the hope that after I do so, the inspiration that I need to fix the middle of my novel will magically appear and afterwards my office will feel like it’s full of unicorns and rainbows.

It’s been two years since I left my job and decided that I wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t under any illusion that doing this would ever make me rich. It wasn’t the money I was seeking, or fame or recognition or anything like that. It was the sense of feeling useful, productive, being able to see on a blank page exactly what I’d produced that day. Having tangible goals. Doing the unthinkable and throwing myself out there, feeding myself to the wolves.

One thing that I did wrongly anticipate was having a real sense of pride in what I do. I’m ashamed to say that although I try to convince myself otherwise on a daily basis, part of me feel like a giant fraud. Especially when people ask how the novel is getting on (‘How long have you been writing it now? Two years?! You must be nearly finished.’) Nope, nowhere even close. I now realise that I probably should’ve started with something slightly more manageable, like a collection of short stories, but I can’t backpedal now. I’ll finish this book if it kills me! (and by the looks of it, it probably will).

Another frustrating aspect of my life right now is that I can’t decide whether I should focus on activism or writing more. Obviously, in writing the novel, I’m tackling both at the same time which, if I wrote it properly, could start a whole new conversation about how we perceive disability as an issue in Ireland (okay, perhaps I am being a little overambitious, but better to aim too high than too low, right?). But then I can feel myself being pulled towards being a full-time activist, always trying to make a difference, and I think to myself: God almighty, what is it I want?!

I’ve also found myself looking at the job section in the paper/on websites a bit more lately and every time I do so, I can physically feel myself trying to repress my urge to write. You said that if you weren’t getting a steady income by the middle of this year, you’d quit. This makes me turn cold. Inner voice, stop talking out of your behind! I can’t quit. People will laugh at me, think badly of me, I’ll have to start all over again and anyway, if I’m ready to quit, what is this magical force that keeps bringing me back to the keyboard?

Maybe it’s organising an event to honour Irish Disability Activists that has me frazzled, but I have to admit that being involved in this project has prompted me to think about the legacy that activists such as Martin and Donal have left to us. I look at them and others, and at what they achieved and failed to achieve for us, and remember their unwavering passion and I think, how did they never lose their passion? How did they and so many others keep going even when they were told they were wrong? They used their voices with confidence; I hide behind a computer screen.

With my words, where I feel safe.

I know that I’m probably going to return to the workforce, sooner rather than later, but I’d rather do it with something to show for myself. Something tangible, preferably a novel or some kind of written portfolio. Something to leave behind. A legacy.

And I suppose, isn’t that what activists and writers have in common: the irrepressible need to leave their mark on the world? Seems they’re not so different, after all.

Flying Low

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Readers, this summer my husband, the little ‘in and I decided to ‘staycate’ in Ireland. We spent a lovely week in Galway and then the two of us went north for a wedding towards the end of July. It’s been a nice summer, but now my husband wants to go abroad later in the year. And while I’d love to, part of me couldn’t be bothered with the rigmarole. Believe it or not, it has nothing to do with flying with our  five year old daughter – she’s more sensible than the two of us combined – but rather the worry about bringing the wheelchair with us.

Don’t bring the wheelchair, we’ve been told before. Rent one instead. Well that’s all well and good, but the truth is I like my wheelchair. I’m used to it, I personally don’t think it’s overly bulky or heavy (125kg),and it means in the airport I can take my time, if I check in early. Admittedly, however, I’ve only brought it once, when we went to Salou in 2015.

This was with Ryanair.

I am not exaggerating when I say I rang their customer service a thousand times to give the specifications of the wheelchair – the weight, make, dimensions and the fact that it had a dry-cell battery. Oh, and the fact that the back folded down. And it was, after all the phone-calls and emails, a hassle-free experience.

I have an Invacare Kite. The same wheelchair as my friend Dani McGovern.

Dani was in my house last Wednesday. She’d called over with her husband John and son Logan and we chatted about how excited she was about little Logan’s first time on the plane (they were going to Birmingham for the weekend with her sister, her brother and their kids). They’d only been away as a couple in Lanzarote  a few months before so they had no reason to believe there’d be any issues this time either.

But when I read Dani’s sister Sharon’s Facebook status yesterday afternoon, I immediately felt sick. The story, which Dani shared with the Irish Independent today, was that there was no issue with Dani’s flight over to Manchester, but on the way home she was asked for the voltage of her battery which she was unsure of (Neither of us have been asked this before. You’re normally asked if it’s a dry or wet cell battery. Wet cell = no flysies. Ours is dry cell). She was given the option of flying without the wheelchair (Dani can’t walk, unless she’s harbouring a secret I don’t know about) or getting off the plane.

Can you imagine being told that your legs were going to be amputated or somehow decommissioned? I’m talking shite now, aren’t I? That’s how much sense flying without Dani’s wheelchair made. So really she had no option but to disembark the flight, leaving her husband and her young son (who, like any two year old, went beserk without his mammy in his eyeline) and wait for the next flight, an hour later, where by some miraculous intervention her chair suddenly wasn’t a ticking time bomb and she could fly! Makes sense, doesn’t it? (Just like my handwriting).

What wasn’t detailed in the article was that this isn’t the first time Dani’s been messed around when flying. We went to Mallorca in 2007, Dani, John Paul and I, and we’d brought Dani’s manual chair for me because taxis over there don’t take electric wheelchairs of the size Dani’s was at the time so we thought we’d have her small one for taxis (and for me if I got tired). Good thing too, because when we landed, the cabin crew arrived with the manual chair but there was no sign of the electric one! Panic is not the word, lads – it was like we’d lost a limb. Eventually it reappeared on the carousel – how it got there I haven’t a clue. In the meantime. our accessible taxi had threatened to leave without Dani, in a foreign country where we knew no-one.

Dani never went to the media about that, and she was within her right to. But if she had not gone this time around she would’ve inadvertently been saying that this treatment is ok, that it was somehow her fault. But it isn’t, and was not.

In short. Dani is more than ‘a girl in a wheelchair’. She’s a college graduate, a woman who’s been living independently since she was nineteen, a woman who’s worked hard to prove herself in every way, and in spite of some negative running commentary is a fantastic wife, loving mother, loyal friend and passionate advocate. She certainly didn’t deserve that treatment.

And in telling her story, she is reminding us that none of us do.

Shoe shopping

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…AND… whatever male audience I might have had is now gone. Oh well!

I’m a rare specimen, me. One of a kind you might say. For example, I HATE shoe-shopping. Apologies to my friends with screen readers who may have just been shouted at, but you need to understand the extent to which I hate it. I think I may hate it more than a typical man does.

See,  the thing is, because of the way I walk, I tend to wear away the inside of my left sole at an alarming rate. So, at most, I tend to get two months tops out of a pair of shoes or boots. And the complications don’t end there. Because of my awkwardness I can only choose from an extremely narrow selection of shoes. I’d like to think that i’d have a selection of shoes in my wardrobe but the reality is I only own two, maximum three pairs at a time.

So when I go shoe- shopping, I have to eliminate the following categories of shoes.

  • High heels, for obvious reasons. For those who don’t know me, I walk as if I’ve been on the beer for three days straight, all the time. If you’re ever looking for a TV extra for the part of drunk randomer, look no further.
  • Mules. They slip on so easily, and also slip off just as easily.
  • UGG boots, or imitation UGGs. There is just too much room to move around in there, and my ever-moving foot likes a little restriction. When I buy imitation UGGs, there’s usually a toe-shaped hole in the left one within five days of purchase.
  • Pumps hate my feet and refuse to stay on. I usually make the mistake of forgetting this until I’m at a wedding or function of some sort rummaging in my bag for hair bobbins to put around them and my feet so they don’t come off.
  • Shoes with laces: Listen, I’m 33 now. If I haven’t mastered tying laces by now, I’m not gonna.
  • Crocs: thankfully not fashionable but also won’t stay on feet.
  • Sandals/flip flops: My toes hate being exposed. They get embarrassed, they’re shy. When wearing these my feet tend to ball up, leaving me frozen on the spot. Lovely.

So what’s left? Granny sandals with Velcro straps, sensible boots with chunky soles and slip-on runners. These are a nightmare to find  unless they’re in season. It’s horrible.

Well, okay. I admit my footwear issues are not as pressing as famine or the threat of terrorism, but having the right shoes is kind of important as far as I’m concerned. They make walking and staying upright a hell of a lot easier, meaning that come the end of the day, I’m not as fatigued as I would be with the wrong shoes.

I believe it was Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird who said you never know a person until you walk around  in their shoes. So, my friend, if you’re wearing high heels, you’d better have a camera ready to send the clip into You’ve Been Framed.

My Dystopian Life

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Guys, this evening as I sit here on my laptop, I’m starting to seriously doubt myself. When I started writing a novel two years ago now, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing or how to plan it out. And man – now it’s a mess. I can still see merit in the story, and I am a hundred percent sure what I wanted to achieve. But another story has beckoned over the last number of months, and it’s a dark, dystopian fiction (but kind of similar to the one I’m writing now in many ways).

In my fourth year of college I was introduced to the world of dystopian fiction by a professor who urged us to  read the novels and afterwards to question everything, to draw similarities between the fictional work and real life. After all, dystopian novels draw from our history. Look at 1984, for example. The use of propaganda (I.e. Hitler) to brainwash the public into trusting the ‘government’, the deliberate rewriting of history to suit a warped political agenda, the destruction of language so that the ‘proles’ have no means of expressing anger towards the Big Brother regime (any of this ringing a bell? Tuam Babies? Garda Corruption?) These are all ways in which people are worn down and forced into a narrative they do not want to partake in. And of course, rebellious Winston is forced into Room 101, where he is tortured into submission when faced with his darkest fear: rats.

Watching the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale has reawakened my fascination with the dystopian form, and it’s interesting to watch my husband’s outraged reaction to the show every Sunday and to point out to him, just as we did in Apocalypse Class ten years ago, the similarities between Gilead and the world we live in now. Of course, we don’t live in the nightmarish worlds of these two novels. But I definitely feel trapped in some kind of dystopian nightmare.

I live in a country that is deliberately denying me my human rights, in a world where I constantly have to prove myself in order to have any kind of credibility. A world in which disability is seen as a medical problem rather than a social one. A world where my voice and the voice of many disabled people are dismissed as trivial or unimportant. The problem is that speaking openly and honestly about disability isn’t seen as ‘cool’ or interesting unless your views are endorsed by some random celebrity or politician, who has no idea what it’s like to be viewed as an inconvenience by your own government.

I believe in something called the philosophy of Independent Living. It was originally an American concept, its birth coinciding with other major political movements originating in the US in the 1960s. Basically, many people, including disabled people, were sick to death of being discriminated against and denied their basic human rights. And so they fought. They protested. Above all, they made it quite clear that the only real authority on the subject of disability were disabled people themselves.

Fast-forward almost sixty years, and what’s changed? Sure, things have improved. Access has improved. Disabled people even have careers and families now. But don’t be fooled: these things haven’t and still don’t come easy. We still have to fight, fight, fight.

But what’s the alternative to fighting? What would happen if disabled people sat back and said ‘sure what’s the point? What can we do?’ Well, I’ll paint you a picture, shall I?

If we continue to allow organisations to represent us instead of us representing ourselves, sooner or later we won’t be trusted in our own opinions at all. We won’t ever challenge ourselves and we will become complacent, so much so that we won’t even notice our human rights being stripped away, one by one.

If we don’t actively promote the social model of disability and be adamant and unwavering in our belief that it’s the society we live in that’s the problem, we will always be seen as patients to be improved, fixed or cured, and future generations will fail to acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong with us.

Today, across Ireland, so many disabled people in Ireland do not get a say in what time to get out of bed, when to eat dinner or where they live. Many are stuck in hospitals or in their parents’ homes where they have no control over many aspects of their lives. This is not okay. Please don’t shrug your shoulders and say ‘oh well that’s just the way it is at the moment, what can we do?’

Imagine if you had to justify every single little decision in order to be able to do what you wanted.

Imagine having to prove yourself every single day in everything you do, and be expected to do so with a smile.

Imagine having to downplay your abilities, almost to the point of degradation, and having to expose your vulnerabilities before getting the basic help you need to live independently.

This isn’t a dystopian novel. This is Ireland, right now.

And for many, it’s a scarier place than any fictional dystopian world ever created.

 

National Carer’s Week 12-18 June

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This week  (12-18 June) marks National Carer’s Week, which is an initiative designed to give recognition to the estimated 180,000 unpaid carers across the country. These people are hailed – and rightly so – as heroic. Many carers have given up dreams of marriage, having a career, maybe juggling caring with raising a family. It’s noble and admirable, yet I find something deeply troubling about the narrative surrounding carers in Ireland.

I probably don’t have any right to be writing this blog.  I’m lucky insofar as my care plan doesn’t currently involve intimate personal care, just help with things like tying up hair, doing buttons etc. I mentioned before that one of the things I value most is my independence. That, and not being labelled a burden.

As a mother of one little girl, I’m ready to plop myself on the couch by eight o’clock in the evening. I love being a mother more than I ever thought I could, but sometimes it can be exhausting – answering incessant questions, doing role plays, going to the park. And this is without having to take care of toileting needs, inserting feeding tubes or anything like that. BUT I would hate to be in that dangerous position where I would view my own daughter more as an object of care than her own little person.

Traditionally, when a disabled person has a child, it is often assumed that the child will take on the role of a carer. Well, let me tell you – Alison has her little chores for which she gets rewarded, but she is not a carer. I have an excellent personal assistant service (not carers) that enables me to be the best mother I can be. I myself direct the Personal Assistant in what I need, and doing so allows me the energy during the day to write pointless blogs like these and spend some quality time with my daughter in the evening. And it allows my husband to enjoy an existence separate from me. I don’t have to worry about him harbouring resentment for me, because I’m not completely dependent on him. We are very much an average husband and wife.

It is harmful to reduce the identity of a person who has ‘high-dependency needs’ to an object of care. Everyone has the right to personal autonomy, to choose how and where they spend their day and with who. I know if I had ‘high dependency needs’ I wouldn’t want my parents, my husband or my child caring for me. I’d want someone fresh, not so emotionally involved, someone who could appreciate my individuality as well as know how to meet my needs. These sort of people are hard to come by. A FETAC Level 5 in Healthcare Support is useful from a practical point of view, but there is a danger that service provision is becoming overmedicalised, with less emphasis on finding out what the person actually wants and more about ticking boxes and providing a basic care plan and often wholly inadequate service.

If this government really cared about the needs of disabled people and their carers, then they wouldn’t dare contemplate cutting the Personal Assistant Hours or the hard-to-come-by Respite Grant. Instead of having a tokenistic approach to unpaid carers by dedicating a measly week to them, the government could alleviate the workload of carers by looking after the needs of the disabled person themselves and, as the late Martin Naughton suggested, allocating them funds so that they (and their families if appropriate) can choose the services they need. Martin called this putting disabled people ‘in the driving seat of their own lives’.

I’ve spoken to people over the last number of years who regard the possibility of acquiring a disability or impairment as ‘a fate worse than death’ and who, like me, would hate to become a burden on their families. But this attitude is a dangerous one. Centuries of conditioning has led us to believe that it’s our impairment that is the problem, and it’s not. It’s the manner in which Irish society and our healthcare system are constructed to make disabled people feel like they’re somehow ‘wrong’, problematic, inconvenient. We are now the only EU member state that hasn’t ratified the UNCRPD. In the UK, disabled people who cannot work are labelled ‘scroungers’ and I can see that attitude creeping in here now. I now believe that positive change is not progressive, and can be undone more quickly than it happened in the first place.

To all of you unpaid carers across the country: I salute you, and keep up the good work. You deserve recognition, not only this week, but every single day. But can I ask a favour? Please join us in challenging the system. Please don’t resent your loved ones for the care they need. They are not at fault. All of our lives would be so much easier if the dignity of disabled people and their carers were upheld through the provision of basic human rights.

 

D-Day

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It’s the first day of the Leaving Cert exams, and I can’t stop thinking about my godchild, whose christening I remember as if it were yesterday, going in to sit what she’s been told are the most important exams of her life.

I was listening to the radio yesterday (not sure who – Matt Cooper, perhaps?) who was talking to students on air and generally saying listen – the Leaving Cert is important, but not that important. Study, but don’t stress. It’s not the end of the world. The Leaving Cert is not the be-all and end-all.

That’s certainly not the impression I somehow got when I did my Leaving Cert, fourteen years ago. I did Transition Year the year before, and I had been on a respite break with seven other friends with disabilities during that year (incidentally, that’s where I met my husband). The message I got from that week was that the best prospects for disabled people was in doing a computer course or going to the National Learning Network to do an endless string of courses in job preparation. Has my journey through mainstream education been a waste of time? I thought glumly. Now don’t misunderstand me, or interpret my reaction to be borderline snobbery, but I was afraid that society was trying to mould me into something I wasn’t. These courses are great, but I do think that students with disabilities should feel that anything is possible.

So, as a statement against the status quo, and because I wanted full control over my future, I decided that the only way I was ever going to do this was to get 500+ points in my Leaving Cert (yes, I am a little mentally unstable-how did you guess?) For nearly two years, I threw myself into my studies. I don’t know how I still had friends at the end of it because I never went out to the Harriers or the Bridge House. I don’t exaggerate when I say I spent a solid six hours after school, studying. Soon I became obsessed. If I was going to spend the time studying, I had to be the best. If I got 75% or less in a class test I would openly bawl my eyes out.

I remember my dad saying to me about a month before the exams that if I didn’t slow down, I would have a massive heart attack and be dead before the Leaving came around. He was so worried that he threatened to stop me sitting them altogether. I looked at him incredulously! What did he know? How could he possibly understand how it felt to be the only person in my year with a (visible) disability and so much to prove? Didn’t he know how important these exams were to my future?

No, and he didn’t care. Neither did mum. What they did care about was the fact that I had no friends apart from John Paul, about the fact that I couldn’t relax, or take an evening off study without having a massive panic attack, about the fact that at 12 o’clock they would walk past my room on the way to bed to find me still studying, my books sprawled all over my bed and me panicking because I couldn’t memorise that Irish poem or the ins and outs of the heart in spite of studying all evening, probably on little or no food and definitely no rest (food and rest is for the weak, yo.)

And yet, it paid off. I got enough points (bang-on enough) to get into Trinity to study English (the DARE scheme may have helped a little). The relief was immense; it took a long  time to get used to not stressing out over the Leaving. And just when I became accustomed to calmness, I had my dissertation and exams to worry about! I really wanted an Honours Degree, and I did study just as hard (albeit in the final few months!) and it paid off…

…and now I am a writer, spending day after day writing and researching, blogging and editing. Did I need a good Leaving Cert to do this? Was it worth the hardship? Personally, in spite of the hellish experience that was my Leaving Cert, I don’t think it’s fair or right at this point to be dismissive of its importance. How can teachers, parents, society think it’s okay to spend two years of a student’s life drumming into students that this is the most important exam they’ll ever sit, and then turn around afterwards and say that it wasn’t that important?

Yes, it’s true, no-one ever asks how many points you got twelve months later or (unless you’re an Irish teacher) you’re never asked about the main themes of A Thig Na Tit Orm. And yes, many of us do want our children to have a strong work ethic, but at what cost? Why are we still sending out the message that your worth as a person is based on one set of examinations, and lying to our young people, saying that it could shape your future for the worst or the best?

Because I’ll let you in on a dirty secret: your worth is not how many points you get. It’s how you use your talents to shape the future, be that through medicine, teaching or volunteering to help others. And guess what? Learning is fun – it’s true! I don’t mean school – I mean the learning you choose to do. I’ve done three correspondence courses so far and it wasn’t about the marks, it was about accomplishing little challenges. I loved them and can’t wait to do more.

So do your best in your exams, and spend the summer doing some proper learning. Learn how to cook, how to use the washing machine, how to budget. How to get a week’s worth of groceries for €25 so you can go out on a Thursday night. Meet new people and learn how to tolerate their quirks and annoying habits.

There are no grades, but these are lessons you won’t forget.

And Caoimhe, best of luck. No matter how these exams go, never forget that you are a kind and wonderful person and we all love you so, so much xx