by Paula Cochran
For myself, the most important thing I wanted for Christian when he began public school in kindergarten was to be treated as an equal. For example, I never wanted him to get an A if he had really earned a B. I found that the kids and teachers didn’t make a big fuss about his being blind; we have never made a fuss about it, so maybe that helped other people feel like it wasn’t that big a deal.
Christian was lucky enough to attend a preschool for the blind in Lancaster County, but we opted to remove him from that program when he was four years old and transfer him to a “normal” preschool so he would be prepared for mainstream kindergarten.
Parents of his kindergarten classmates found their children playing “blind,” trailing walls and eating with their eyes closed, etc. This opened the door for a lot of discussion about Christian’s blindness and after a time, I think people who got close to him “forgot” he was blind, so it wasn’t an issue. We never tried to make Christian “special,” in terms of needing all kinds of special things. He was Christian and he happened to be blind and therefore needed Braille and a cane, etc. to accomplish the same tasks everyone else was doing.
The kids in his preschool even got mad at him for “cheating” when they had to identify things in a closed brown paper bag by touch. Of course Christian always saw by touch, so they assumed he had an unfair advantage — and must be cheating — when he won the game! You need to have a sense of humor about things like that and not take them as a personal offense.
As a parent I’ve also felt that if Christian wanted to be a basket weaver or a broom maker, we’d back him 100 percent, but I didn’t want him having those goals as his only career options. I always tell him his chances of being a bus driver are probably slim, but other than that the world is an open door. The year before Christian started school, he spent one afternoon per week learning the school. This was good exposure for the staff. When Christian started kindergarten he went to school on the bus and walked right in the front door and to his classroom, unassisted, which immediately gave the other students and parents an impression of competence. Had we walked him into the school and to his class, like many of the mothers of the sighted students, I think their reaction would have been to pity Christian, thinking that, because he was blind, he could never find his class without sighted assistance. But they were left there to gawk, in great surprise, with their own children clinging to their thighs. While he was in kindergarten he stayed one afternoon per week and ate in the cafeteria with his orientation and mobility instructor. When he started first grade he was able to get in line with his class and go through the lunch line and find a seat just like everyone else.
People often thought it must be so hard to learn Braille, but he learned his letters one at a time just like everyone else. He was doing whatever his class was doing throughout his education in public school. Braille isn’t harder, just different. When Christian had a list of spelling words, he needed to learn them the “regular” way and in contracted braille, as well, so some things were harder. But he didn’t need to learn things like cursive, so I think the work load balanced out.
Christian has never been an especially active kid, which may have hurt him socially at times, when all the other kids were running around all over the place.
But I’m not sure he would be an especially active person even if he were sighted. He’s always been a bookworm, and he loves electronics and things like that. He has several good friends who are into the things he's into and who aren’t especially active either, and they are not blind. I used to wonder if his inactivity was related to his blindness, but then I realized that my brother, who wasn’t blind, was never a very active person either; now he is an engineer and travels all over the world. So I try not to make Christian’s lifestyle choices into a “blind thing.”
I never found the kids in school to be mean to Christian because he was blind. Christian has always been the first person in a group to make a blind joke and be able to laugh at himself, which would give someone who wants to be mean less to work with. He told a friend of mine several blind jokes and she in turn shared them at a party and a guy came up to her and gave her all kinds of grief for “making fun of ‘handicapped’ people.” She told him that her friend’s blind son had told her the jokes and he should lighten up.
Christian came home from school one day when he was in third grade and announced that he’d learned that very day that he was “handicapped.” He had never known he was! He wasn’t upset about it. They were studying different kinds of disabled people and he learned that blind people were considered “handicapped.” We never told him he was handicapped or handicapable or any of those terms. I thought that was kind of funny, because we never looked at Christian as handicapped. He has challenges that other people don’t, but other people have challenges that he doesn’t, so we never told him his blindness was classified as anything at all. I know people who make such a big fuss and stink about their child’s blindness that the poor kid must feel like an alien or something. I think it’s bad for a child’s self-esteem to always have to be first, special or different and handled with kid gloves because of a disability.
Last winter my husband’s friend from work stopped over just as my husband pulled in with a pickup truck overflowing with firewood. It was bitter cold with howling winds when my husband came in and hollered, “Christian, get your coat and boots. There is wood to unload.” Well, Christian went out and stumbled on to that pile of firewood and started unloading. He was working hard and it was cold. My husband’s friend was watching Christian through the living-room window. He wanted to help this poor blind kid unload the huge truck load of firewood. We practically had to sit on the guy. We needed to explain to him that Christian is part of the family, and that includes doing his fair share of the labor, like it or not. If we didn’t give him a job, he’d feel useless. There are things that are too dangerous on our farm, and we didn’t think he’d be able to handle a chain saw, so this was his job. We heat our house with wood, and unloading and stacking the firewood is Christian’s contribution to the family. Christian did get that truck empty and came in dirty and tired and very cold. I don’t know, but I think that guy would have pitied Christian more if we had left him in the house, giving the impression that a blind person could never do a task such as unloading firewood. I think that guy left with a different impression about blindness than he came with, and I believe it was a positive one.
Anyway, I think for both of my kids, the most important thing, in school and out, is for them to believe that they are capable of doing or being anything they choose. Lots of people may think my daughter can’t do certain things because she is a girl, and maybe they will think that Christian can’t do certain things because he is blind. I want my children to do what they think they can do, not letting other people stereotype them or put obstacles in their way.
Caption
Christian Cochran prepares bottles for the calves on his family’s dairy farm. (Photo courtesy of Paula Cochran.)