Moving boundaries
New Year, new boundaries.
Having spent fourteen plus years looking after daughter and managing many of the small details of her life – does she need a new toothbrush? What about feminine products? – I have decided that this year, she is old enough to manage these for herself. Goodness knows, she is far cleverer than me in a whole host of ways, and she can afford to leaven her lying about our home with a few trips to the shop at the top of the road – it is, literally, at the top of our short road. And no, she does not need to be subsidised for all her trips to town. Not only do I still pay for most of her clothes – she chooses, I foot the bill – but she gets pocket cash and extra money regularly.
It’s proving more difficult than expected to wean her off the oversight I have been used to provide, and which, if I am not careful, can swing so easily into a host of small remembered details for which I am expected to assume responsibility: Has she fed her cavies today, and has she remembered to take her keys? But moving boundaries are natural and necessary.
As our child grows, my responsibility is shifting away from actual doing for her, to more of the prompting to do for herself, which in itself signals the letting go that we must all renegotiate constantly, so that when she leaves home she can manage all her own small details competently. Yes, I allow for adolescent sleeping and relaxing. I did a lot of that myself. But increasingly, I view it as my role to advise, rather than simply doing for her, again and again. Lifts to activities become weather checks and bus-fares.
I find myself deciding to cast off stuff I have usually done for hubby too. He buys his own clothes now, without any help from me: so instead of four button cuff work shirts, he mistakenly buys two dress shirts which require impractical cuff links. I could get cross, or I could simply reflect that this is a learning curve like all learning curves. Today he wore a dress shirt to work, and enjoyed doing so.
With all this delegation and consequent extra free time I create for myself, my responsibilities change too. I must do more to stay fit – swimming again, walking more, getting outside every day – and work properly, writing and producing good, enjoyable material I can be proud of. I have no more excuses for wasting time or for taking lazy short-cuts.
If this year is to mean anything, I have to follow through with my personal and professional goals, and make sure that I do my best to meet them honestly. If there are a few seismic shifts on the way, I’ll deal with them too.
Thanks for reading.
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January 15, 2018
How we define ourselves
Fran Macilvey cerebral palsy, Fran Macilvey, Fran's School of Hard Knocks 0 Comments
My earlier post ‘Dissing Ability’ has left me wondering.
If, as I suggest there, most employers and most members of the public are at worst incurious about impairments and, at best willing to be encouraging and supportive, from where comes this habit we have acquired of identifying ourselves first and foremost by what hinders us: “Hello, my name is David and I have CP.”
Increasingly, anti-discrimination legislation is regulating what we regard as acceptable behaviour carried out in the public eye. We are all guaranteed access to retail outlets, to cinemas, to public pools and all forms of transport; we can expect respect in speech and in public gatherings of all sorts. Even smoking and littering are punished with a fine. So, if the public at large have few problems and are willing to see progress in more tolerant attitudes, whence cometh the idea that we must define ourselves by what we can’t do? Naturally, it seems that such attitudes are dying out gradually, and good riddance. No-one I know seems to miss them.
Is it the form-filling? The questions – on very long forms – that we have to answer, in order to qualify for public assistance? Is it the expectation, even in this day and age, that all our income must be justified and scrutinised, earned and worthy? I wonder…
Claiming benefits these days is a very complex process, designed, so many suspect, to put people off claiming their share of what should be a universal entitlement based firmly around need. But why make the system so complex? Increasingly, claimants are required not only to navigate a system that makes Mensa members look slow-witted, but to answer personal questions – can you dress yourself? Can you go to the toilet unaided? Can you climb steps? – which have no place being logged in the public sphere. Having answered questions like these to the best of their ability, service users are often penalised for later failing other requirements, time limits, box ticking… It’s not just adults with various impairments who are affected. The long-term incapacitated, single parents, those with caring responsibilities… Many people claiming benefits have to answer rather oddly prejudicial questions about their personal circumstances.
Personally, I favour a system of Universal Basic Income, which would allow us to get away from needs based assessments, encouraging us all to get on with their lives in any way we wish, without undue intrusion from the State, and without salacious and misinformed information gathering. Such as step as universal basic entitlement would remove most of the pretexts that currently exist to allow the collection of personal and private data.
Because service users become used to a system, numb to its cruelties, does not make it right, or worthy of one of the world’s richest nations in the twenty-first century. We need a system that allows its citizens to go about their lives, living as they choose to live, without undue intrusion and respecting their rights to privacy, peace of mind, honesty and personal dignity.
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