Mondays with Mike: Looking mahvelous

Beth got a lot of reaction from her post about being hassled by a creepy guy, and having Whitney and a Good Samaritan banker help her. Apart from the comments, there were a lot of phone calls and in-person talks.

Some expressed surprise and regret at having never thought about what being in a situation like that would be like if you can’t see. For me, I’m all too familiar with the difficulties Beth faces. But for you out there, I have a theory—the reason you might not think about the difficulties is because Beth makes it look, well, if not easy, then perfectly normal.

The gals get around.

It’s neither, really. Beth’s in a position where she doesn’t want people to under-rate her capabilities just because she’s blind. So are other disabled people, or people who, by any number of measures, stand out as different.

It’s a tough place to be. Because, by my lights, the adaptation and the workarounds Beth manages speak to toughness and resourcefulness. I don’t think I’m alone in that regard, but in our experience, lots of people assume Beth won’t be able to do certain things simply because she can’t see.

Of course, there are indeed things that she can’t do—I know first hand. In the early days of her blindness, most tasks were beyond her. Over time, that’s changed. The divisions of labor in our household lives have substantially evened out. I’m better at vacuuming; Beth makes the bed (which I hate doing). When we’re having friends over for dinner, Beth cleans the bathroom, folds the napkins just so and sets the table. And so on.

But the truth is, Beth faces a lot of quirky difficulties, as well as obvious ones. Some have to do with the attitudes we of sight privilege have. It’s a been a lesson to me, learned over time, that one can have the tendency to assume that, for example, a blind person couldn’t know better than I where a building is, or how to get to said building. Trust me, Beth’s pretty damn good at directions. But it’s also aggravating and at times hurtful to her when she’s disregarded.

Other things are sort of mechanical. Let’s say, oh, Beth’s husband forgets to put the salt shaker back where we’ve agreed to keep it. It might be six feet away, but it might as well be outside on the sidewalk if it’s in the wrong place. There’s a long list of “so near, so far” things like that.

For many years, the digital version of that phenomenon was vexing. Beth’s talking computers have been a godsend. But, every once in awhile, something disagrees with JAWS, the software that helps her navigate the screen and hear everything on it. A common culprit: After doing a search and replace in Microsoft Word, the computer stops talking. Now, the computer hasn’t crashed—a sighted person with a mouse could click on a window and keep working away. But without the voice and screen navigation active, Beth is really in the dark.

In the old days, that might mean Beth waiting until I got home from work—or recruiting a neighbor or the barista to take a look. The latter didn’t always work, though, because the speech software is a little quirky to the uninitiated.

In fact, if you know what you’re doing and you can see, it’s two clicks. Well, thanks to screen sharing software (we use TeamViewer), now when her computer stops talking Beth just texts me to tell me to do that voodoo that I do so well. I log in to her machine from wherever I am (including, say, from Alaska) and voila!

I could go on. I won’t, but one other thing to all you great people out there trying to do the right thing. Let Beth and Whitney open and pass through doors by themselves. Clear out! Because I’ve seen Beth with a bloodied forehead enough to know that it’s not a good idea if the door has been opened and she doesn’t know it.

Finally, to all you people who marvel at how Beth does it: Well, it ain’t easy, and she’s even more marvelous than anyone but I can know.