Disability Invisibility Goggles

We historically do not like people who think differently than we do. We want things to work out the way we want them to and we surround ourselves the best way we can so things work out the way we want them to. When things don’t work out the way we want them to we get upset. We may blame ourselves, we may blame others, or we may blame God.

People with disabilities don’t work out the way we want them to. Think on how people with disabilities have been treated through the years. Disability is not seen as a part of the human condition. Disability has been explained away as a curse, a burden; shamed, hidden, tucked away. A therapist once asked me if I blamed myself for Wil’s birth. Hmmm, she didn’t ask me if I blamed myself for Katherine and Elizabeth’s birth.

Wil doesn’t fit into the definition of “things working out the way we want them to.” Sure, you could argue nothing really does, but did people celebrate your baby’s birth or tell you they were sorry? Wil lives outside of the above definition no matter how broad, wiggly or faint that line is.

There is a 5-year-old boy with autism that I work with. When we are out in the hallway transitioning from the classroom to a special, he likes to pretend he is a chameleon. He’ll push himself up against the wall and tell me he’s invisible; that I can’t see him. It’s a stall tactic, of course. I play along, asking where he went. I ask passerby’s in the hall if they can see him. The passerby’s smile, look back and forth down the hall and put their hands up. “I can’t see him anywhere.”

One day I thought of circling my fingers around to my thumb and placing my circled hands up to my eyes like glasses. I twisted my hands saying, “Click-click-click. I’m adjusting my invisibility goggles. Ahh, that’s better, now I can see. Hey, there you are!”

Raising Wil is like wearing invisibility goggles. I never knew this whole new way of seeing things was always available to me until I had a reason to care to see it.

I made my way through life, thinking the thoughts I did, defining things the way I did, without much further thought. I’d look up, I’d look down, and if things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to, I’d make them conform to my definition of what worked for me. My definition of “right.”

But what is right? What is normal? According to whom? Even if we don’t want to, we all have innate definitions of what these words mean to us.

Now I believe a better question is, What is? What is right in front of me? Am I seeing it for what it is?

Click-click-click.

My answers to these questions will forever be limited by my own vision; my own versions of right, my own versions of what works for me. My answers, though, as limited as they are, always have room for expansion. My view is no longer static, but fluid. There is always another level to view, another perspective to consider, another evolution to realize.

Raising Wil, I quickly realized I had to be fluid in my learning or I’d go crazy. The perspective I had at the time of his birth was not conducive to raising a child with Down syndrome. But here I was. It didn’t work for me, but I needed to make this work for me.

I realized then that I had a pair of invisibility goggles burning a hole in my pocket waiting for me to notice them. When I did, I never looked back. Invisibility goggles don’t work in reverse. The just look deeply inward, and expand outward.

Click-click-click.