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The Repression of Rachel

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It was a miserable September afternoon, the 19th if I’m not mistaken, and I was sitting in the Hilton Hotel in Kilmainham with a man I’d only met once before, having coffee in the middle of the day. Sounds sordid, but I assure you it wasn’t. It was purely business. You see, I’d written a monologue and I was due to perform it in the Mansion House at a massive disability event on 23rd September, but something about the piece felt hollow, and so Peter was trying to encourage me to inject a bit of personality into it.

‘Who is this character?’ he demanded as we reread the script, me eyeing him warily. Surely he wasn’t suggesting that my perfectly written script required an overhaul, four days before the bloody event?

‘What do you mean? It’s an everyman-type character.’

‘Well, where’s she from at least?’

I knew the answer to this. ‘She’s from Kinvara. My aunt lives just outside it, in the Burren. What I’ve always found interesting about Kinvara is that it’s in County Galway, kind of on the Clare border. I thought that it’d be a good metaphor for this character, who’s stuck between having a disability and needing services to live independently, and being capable in so many ways too. She’s confused and angry about how society defines her.’

‘And if she were an animal, what would she be?’ he asked. He’s lost it, I thought. Finally I answered:

‘A caged tiger.’

‘And what is it that fuels her anger?’

I composed a perfectly generic answer: ‘The way in with society treats her like an ‘other’ and as I said before, confusion about her place in society.’

Peter wasn’t happy with my answer. ‘Be more specific. What fuels your anger?’ A lump formed in my throat.

‘The way I was treated after my daughter was born.’ As I told Peter the story, my heart broke in the same places it did nearly six years ago when I found myself trying to convince medical ‘experts’ – as well as myself – that I was a capable mother. After I finished, Peter grinned.

‘Now that’s a story worthy of drama.’ I went cold. Was he seriously suggesting I get emotionally naked in front of two hundred people?

He certainly was.

And so, on the 23rd September, I performed a monologue that I had co-written (I don’t normally write in collaboration, but it’s time to open up my mind to new experiences) in front of two hundred people.  And since 3 December marks International Day of People with Disabilities, I thought it would be appropriate to share it with you today.

 

Rachel from Kinvara, by Peter Kearns and Sarah Fitzgerald

(Rachel is sitting in a chair and a woman dressed in a white coat is sticking labels on her – scrounger, handicap, vulnerable, waste-of-space etc)

Go away. I said – go away.

Just five minutes. five minutes – that’s all I ask.

And don’t worry, I won’t forget I’m not ‘normal’

I can’t forget – I’m not allowed to forget – we are never allowed to forget!

Well I wish I could forget you… this horrible pain you’ve inflicted upon me…

But you don’t understand. I tried – I did my best…

Yes – yes I did…

people never get to hear my voice…

You say it’s because ‘they’ – those ‘mainstreamers’ – won’t understand me.

Instead you encourage them to pity me, to try and ‘cure’ me….

I am broken because you have broken me.

You told me that the only way that my life could be better

was if I improved, if I made the effort…

You promised me if my impairment were cured, that I could have everything…

I did the exercises  – stretched on the hard, sticky medicine ball and I endured your prodding and poking, cutting me open  and sewing me back together and – Look at me!

What do you see when you look at me?!

I don’t know how you look people in the eye…

Convince them that you know what’s best for me…

Convince me -and them – I know nothing about running my own life…

Will you be the one to bend down and kiss me on the cheek

And stick me into a Galway or Clare nursing home

Take me out to your AGM – that once a year ‘thing’ that makes you feel good

And then store me away like normies store their Christmas decorations in the attic –

Never to be seen from one end of the year to the next?

Am I starting to sound like a broken record?

Normies think that it’s okay that I have to give twenty four hours’ notice before using public transport?

That I would rather laze around on benefits than contribute to society?

Loads – I’ve shitloads – Loads to say… but hey…

It’s easier to believe I’m a freeloading scrounger rather than someone, who could be… someone….

Actually I am someone. Seven years ago I became a wife and two years later I became a mother. But you couldn’t let me have that, could you?

Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.

You told me that I would be a danger to my own baby.

And… even after doing all the ‘normal’ things – the Leaving Cert – battling access in an inaccessible college – being a wobbly yummy mummy was taking that mainstreaming that little bit too far.

I caught you spying on me while I struggled in the playground with those shitty nappies, staring while I tried to breastfeed – your stares dried up my milk, your judgement lessened my embraces.

I felt worthless, damaged. For a long time you led me to  believe I was not a proper  mother.

Do you know how good it feels to have proven you wrong?

And how degrading it was to have to do it in the first place?

I have a daughter, she calls me mummy

I care for her, not the other way round. Of all the labels you’ve placed on me, it’s my label – my favourite.

She is my proudest achievement – my legacy.

And you won’t ever be able to take that from me – would you – could you?

So here I am… in Kinvara… neither Galway nor Clare… neither specialised nor mainstreamed – literally ‘idir eatha’ as the mystics would say, ‘between worlds’ – the hard world of your anxious clinical society and a place I know in myself, in the unfolding mystery of my daughter…

… and her name is… (lights down)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.