by Deborah Armstrong
With Mother’s and Father’s Days soon to arrive, it is with fondness that I recall stories about my happily married parents.
Before I entered kindergarten, my mom decided I would not attend the school for the blind. This was 1963, when mainstreaming was a future dream. But she set out to make it a reality.
After contacting various local school districts, she learned an experimental mainstreaming program was being set up about 20 miles away in another city, and I could enroll there in the first grade.
But I was only four years old. So instead, my mom enrolled me in the local nursery school, and a year later, the local kindergarten, without telling the authorities her child was blind. After some arguments with the schools, I was enrolled, and learned to play with blocks, fingerpaint, print my name, color with crayons and even get in a fight.
By the time first grade rolled around, the experimental program had finished two years and was more than ready for me. I was taken out of P.E. and art periods to work with a blind resource teacher to master Braille and very basic steps towards O&M. One happy memory is how my blind special ed teacher would hide a ticking wind-up clock in her room, and I was invited to play the game of trying to find it by orienting to its sound. She would time me and I got to compete with myself as the hiding places became more and more clever. Being exposed to an adult blind role model when I was only six, and also able to make both friends and enemies with other sighted kids my age, helped me build a great deal of self-confidence.
Because the only mainstream program was miles away, I had to ride a special bus for two hours. With nothing else to do, I read, and I thank the special bus for making me a rapid and confident Braille reader.
When I was seven, my mom decided I needed to learn to type. Each afternoon, as I returned home from school, I’d sit at a folding card table with a little red Royal typewriter and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. On the tapes, Mom would record lessons from a secretarial training manual she had received in 1948. At first, I typed simple sentences like “Dad is sad,” but later on they became much harder. My favorite one was, “Gladys Williams picked six quarts of very juicy strawberries.”
But mostly I hated the lessons, believing I had the meanest mom in the world. That was because she had a single rule: I had to type a perfect page before I could go outside to play. As I churned out little practice sentences, I fantasized about getting out my skate key, screwing those roller skates onto my shoes, and gliding down the neighbor’s extra-steep driveway. But eventually, the page would get typed, the skates installed, and I’d be outside getting into trouble like any other kid.
Though my lower middle-class parents had very little education, I was rarely overprotected. I got spanked for climbing the neighbor’s tree and walking around on his roof, but nobody tried to keep me indoors.
When I was 10, the San Francisco Bay area completed work on its ambitious subway project, BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit. I had just begun to learn cane travel and wasn’t allowed yet to cross streets independently. But my dad wanted to ensure I felt comfortable with BART. He walked me around our local station describing everything, showing me how to buy a ticket and how the escalators worked. He even took my hand and had me walk along the platform, my cane tip dropping off the edge, reasoning that if I could “see” the edge with my cane I would not fall off the platform. By the time I could ride it independently as a teen, I felt far more confident about it than many blind adults.
My dad also devised a cool trick for helping me learn to walk in a straight line. He ran a long rope down our driveway, taped it down and had me practice walking along it with my toe just touching the rope. When he tried it himself, blindfolded, while the rest of the family scored us, he never got very good at it, so I was super proud to always beat him.
My mobility instructor was the first African-American hired by our school district, and my parents were forever getting calls telling them their blind child was being followed around by a large black man. They adored him and were quick to sing his praises and remind people how their prejudiced attitudes were not appreciated. That early exposure helped me to become open-minded and inclusive.
When I was in high school, I was permitted to take public transportation home instead of riding the special bus. I had to transfer and walk two blocks downtown. One afternoon, after I’d exited the first bus, a man grabbed me from behind with his arm around my neck. I had taken a self-defense course for disabled youth, and I kicked out with my right leg while jumping up to hang off the arm encircling me. I was taught doing this could prevent the attacker from choking. For good measure I also punched the guy in the nose.
He let go and began to simultaneously howl with pain and laugh. It was my dad, checking to see if I took the self-defense class seriously. Now he felt confident having me take those buses home. My mom scolded him for doing something that could have gotten him arrested, but he always said my quick response gave him the peace of mind he needed.
When I was in college and no longer qualified for mobility instruction, I had a terrible dilemma. My friends all went to a favorite restaurant across the street from the college, but I could never find it to join the party. In desperation, I called my dad, though as a young adult, asking my parents for help was embarrassing.
He drove out to the school and discovered that though it was indeed across the street, I had to cross two intersections which were not lined up with each other. Understanding that I would be mortified to have my father leading me around, he gave me precise directions over the phone that no mobility instructor could have topped. And after that I joined my buddies nearly every day after class!
My dad was the family cook, and when he prepared supper, he always brought out knives, cutting boards and bowls to all kids watching TV and instructed each person to chop a vegetable for the meal. This happened when we were children and much later when my college friends hung out at our house.
When he had a stroke at age 85, and could no longer walk, I, now in my sixties, often cooked when he came to visit. And I’d always hand him a cutting board and knife as he sat in front of my TV while he pretend-complained about the unfairness of doing chores. It was our private game. His early insistence on delegating taught me how to become a leader, and that was one of the best gifts he gave me.