Politically Incorrect And Funny
When I was 20 years old I began a job working with people with disabilities. I did this for a about 4 years and it was probably the toughest work I’ve ever done – even to this day. I commend families for their love and patience who have chosen to care for their adult children with disabilities and anyone who volunteers or makes their living in the human services field. It can be emotionally draining an physically exhausting, not just for the care providers but also for the people who are receiving services.
When I started, I worked with six different people, all with incredibly different personalities, needs, learning styles and challenges. I worked in a residence home where there were (2) three bedroom apartments. There were three men who lived in the upstairs apartment and three women in the downstairs one. I mostly worked downstairs.
The men upstairs were really different from each other. One only spoke only in vowels. I know it’s strange but imagine it! Another guy who lived there could remember every detail of the most random information including my entire family’s names, brothers, sisters, grandparents. The third man had an unusual, I don’t know.. thing going on for him; he sexualized cars, particularly brown-colored Pontiacs – I know! Ewwwe! That’s totally an old person’s car!
The guys lived upstairs and we did things communally at times, but I worked mostly with the women in the downstairs apartment. One of the women them was developmentally disabled because she was diagnosed with epilepsy at a very young age and basically thrown into an institution when she was a little girl and brutally neglected. I’m sure there were other things that were brutally done there, but she never spoke of it. One of the other women there was hard to describe, she was what they called at the time ‘high functioning’. I don’t know what that is called now with all the language change in human service jobs. But with her, there were times when she was clearly, well, I’m just going to say it, faking it. She was a heavy set late thirties woman who had a severe anger problem. She had rage fits and had attacked a couple of people for catching her chugging ice cream or hording food.
But I had developed a nice rapport with one of the women who lived there. She was the ‘lower functioning’ of the three, which I hate to even say but it was, well, true. Her name was Maria. Maria was an Italian girl who had Downs syndrome and it was the early 90’s and she was in her late twenties. So when she was a kid, she was not treated the way kids with Downs are today. She was sometimes ignored, protected, told she couldn’t do something or never offered to learn. But completely opposite of that, because of her mother, Maria could speak a little bit in two languages, English and Italian. She also knew a little sign language. She was very emotional and she loved to feel productive and didn’t mind housework, sweeping and doing the dishes. But for the wrong staff person, she pretended she didn’t understand you and would stair up at the drop ceiling with her mouth open and look around.
When Maria was a kid, I’m not sure how old she was, I’m guessing early teen years, her Mom was in the yard one icy winter day hanging garments on the clothes line when she fell and broke her hip. When Maria saw this, she ran off down the street completely distraught and no one knew where she went, her mom was worried. Turns out she went to get help and brought someone back to help her Mom and called the ambulance. When her mom was sent to a home for rehab, there was no place for Maria to go. She was abruptly sent to a group home where she had never been before with all new and strange people, not understanding what was happening to her.
As you can imagine, Maria was frustrated. For her own relief, Maria would crank up her cassette tape of her favorite songs by Air Supply and jump up and down in the living room of the bottom floor apartment. It shook the entire three-story building to it’s foundation. The first time I heard this, I thought it was the first, real live, east coast earthquake. I ran as fast as I could around the apartment to try to figure out what it was. When I found her, she was dressed head to toe in her purple matching poly-blend pants and sweatshirt, and plastic-beaded necklace. Her thick round glasses were smeared with food from dinner, snot from fishing in her nose, and God knows what else, and she was Pogo-ing up and down singing Lost in Love. I don’t know how anyone could fucking Pogo to that song, but Maria was and she was tearing it up.
For some reason, Maria and I bonded quickly and we definitely played favorites with each other. She was always a cooperative friend when I was working, but when others were working on my days off, she pretend not to understand things that she clearly did. She would yell things like “he hit me!” when other staff were no where near her. And many times late at night she would open her bedroom window open and yell my name out the window calling to me to come over, she wanted my shift to start.
One time on my shift she got off the bus from work and ran away, down the hill to the center of town. She hauled her chubby ass running the whole way about a mile away to go to the park in front of the courthouse to splash her bare feet in the fountain. When I found her there and saw her, I thought you know what, if I were her, I want to run away too! I would have been like: “Fuck this whole communal living bullshit, with two other women who I don’t know or like, and a staff of people basically telling me what to do day-in and day-out.” I felt like she and I understood each other. After that incident I scheduled time with Maria during my shift to walk places and when the weather permitted, we walked to the courthouse fountain and took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our pants and dangled our feet in the bird-turd water. We didn’t care, it was her freedom.
It was hard to think of this friend of mine, Maria, as a prisoner of sorts, after her Mom was injured and she was displaced. With her I felt more like a friends, not service provider – client. I think if she could have articulated it, she might have said the same. I think that’s what she was trying to say when yelling out my name at 2am.
There were times during my shift when I laughed my ass off with one of the women I worked with and their pranks – there were many. I also got teary sometimes at how beautifully simple life was at times, dancing in the same pattern and movement for hours could bring such peace to their souls, while other times being witness to their frustration with their life or limitations was more than I could bare. Maybe that’s what burned me out of this job so quickly.
When there were hard days, sometimes I would get home and need some form of comic relief after my 72-hour shifts. I used to go home and share in monologue style the very real, funny, and sometimes unbelievable stories with my roommates. I would do impressions of my client-friends, just as I would any other of my friends when telling stories. I spent so much time working there that I got to know their voices, their ticks, and dialects. My roommates and I would laugh at the stories – not the people. We would also laugh at how most of the caregivers treated the clients with such kid gloves, while getting the wool pulled over their eyes by the clients. We laughed at the irony of the real life situations that caregivers were supposed to be of aid, when it was the clients who often knew the simple answers.
Working with people with disabilities helped me rethink my definition of what is normal in this world and change it to something more like this: Everything is, well, normal. Or: It’s all a freak show! And those things feel like the same thing to me. I mean this in the most beautiful sense imaginable.
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a blog online and made me think of this time in my life when I used to work in human services. Like I said, it’s a tough gig! Sometimes you just want to not have to mind your every word and not have to say things the right way to tell the story of the day, in the most direct fashion possible. Everyone needs to blow off a little steam about it and laugh. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND, this link is not for the staunch, politically correct folks out there – you may be completely offended. If this is you, skip it! Trust me you will hate it. For others out there, you might see that the person writing it wanted to share funny stories that happened to them during their day working with people with disabilities. Here is the link: www.tard-blog.com Two particularly funny stories on here are about the Field Trip and the follow up to the Field Trip.
What I think could be really great is if someone would put together a blog that was the inverse of this one – where people with disabilities described their days with the REAL ‘tards’ that they have to deal with, the people whothink they are NORMAL just because they get paid to help make dinner with them or waited for the bus with them to go to work. Now that would be an awesome blog too.
LYMI, XO – Ian