Preparing For Writing Group...

 a snippet from "Unwelcome Miracle"

Minerva sat up in bed with some difficulty.  She liked to do what little she could for herself.  Even though she knew she was lucky to have help most of the time when she needed it but it still irked her (even without really knowing another kind of life) when something she’d struggled over for ages took someone else a literal minute to complete.  She hoped that her latest new attendant really did understand how to plug her chair in properly; if not, it would even be a slower day than usual, even, tomorrow.  She and Jess had hung out once in a while at school and then  “People You May Know” and a caregiving crisis brought them in each other’s orbits again.   Being sort-of friends was different than Jess being responsible, though, right?  Even if she did take the best notes.

 Hard enough to deal with moving home after thirty, without feeling hamstrung by technology and helpless besides. Those people who swore disability never held them back had secondary conditions as *liars* She sighed, feeling a hundred little aggravations from the day bubble back up, but for now, she could let them go, and find something on TV to console herself with.

More than the dregs of a drink on her battered nightstand that had all the marks from drinking glasses on it. The attendant had given her a look, but had made and brought the rum and coke without commentary—she supposed the extra courtesy and obedience wouldn’t last. Both Minerva and the attendants were usually super-nice for three months or so, but she expected she’d hear about her minor tipple again soon. People liked to protect Minerva; maybe because she was small and blonde and looked like she needed a rescuer, though that’s not how she felt in her own mind.

She drained her glass.  For once, despite Minerva’s being contained enough to make anyone’s finger-wagging on “drowning your sorrows’ laughable, since she’d never gone nuts in her life, that last night before she knew everything changed. she wished there were more in the glass as she enjoyed the slight blurring of her life’s edges. As soon as the last cherry- tinged drop slid down her throat, she wished she had the nerve, and the fortitude to ask for or, maybe, demand another one. Maybe two, enough to make this room and the thoughts that sometimes told her she wasn’t good enough became blurry or even completely absent...She heard her parents’ deep breathing down the hall.  Now, what to watch?

Sometimes flicking channels felt like the thing she knew best and that thought made her sad, but a show or movie might be more restful than the book of short stories she took to bed with her.  That had been a tough week. She happily landed on one of her favorite movies so she was happy for about twenty minutes as she caught the end and had to start scrolling through channels again, a trace of a smile on her face left from the cinematic kiss that closed out one of her favorites.

Sometimes it made her feel sad—or at least awkward, even on a day that was so bug-in-a- rug as this one, how excited she got watching these unsubstantial, fictional figments of people kiss. Maybe it was good to play out the memory of that light and swoony feeling so that her heart didn’t fully harden through the slog that was a lot of her daily life.  She wasn’t sure any real love affair she had had been like that for longer than a moment—both of hers hadn’t--, but she went to sleep with a smile on her face, which was all that she could ask right then.

Minerva slept peacefully for a few hours, awakened by a pure white light filling her bedroom, and, maybe, her body, too. It felt like the beginning of a sexy dream, or the moment after her favorite pop song-- that inhabited, expectant silence. She felt both warm and cool at the same time.  She wondered if the bright light was some kind of comet or if the people across the street brought some kind of floodlight

 

Lateral Ableism, Part Two...More on Wildflower

 

In the end, the movie was… fine.

Even kind of messy-cute and replete with sitcom legends(Which usually earns a lot of goodwill from me, but maybe I’m not in the mood to settle back and be a good audience right now, for reasons that might not have anything to do with this movie in its own right.)

It’s a weird feeling when a movie shows you something that it thinks is a ton of struggle and you think “Wow, I wish it could be that easy,” specifically the wacky family that circles the wagons and the smart, savvy-seeming social worker that doesn’t make Bea’s problems about her in any way whatever—they’re out there, but diplomatically? “Results not typical.”

(Can we all stop equating college with the Promised Land? I can’t be the only one who’s had that myth mess with her head for decades…being disabled, fiftyish, and Expelled From Eden is…kind of a lot.)

That sort of animatronic quality I’ve noticed in Kiernan Shipka since we saw her rub one out on “Mad Men” makes her perfect as someone who grew up too fast.(Maybe she grew up too fast?)

Also, where does the money come from? Living on disability, at least to an extent, means  that money casts a shadow over everything. Whether you literally don't have it and are broke or because there is a gap between your life and what's on the ever-present forms that haunt you like patchouli in the seventies.

The Case Of The Lateral Ableism, Part One...

 

I didn’t want to write about or even watch “Wildflower” all that much, at first. I really do think my first response was somewhere between “Ugh,” and “Ew,”(Which is one thing considering that algorththmic “instincts” are not infallible—I get shown things because I once liked a british actor with big teeth, and I can see why the machines thought sitcom legends+disability themes in a gentle perfect word and thought “Hey, Chica, we got you.”)
And maybe they will.  But at least part of my disgust is brought on by

Lateral ableism

https://meryl.net/ableism-microaggressions/

(I don’t say that because I think I’m a jerk, I mean, sometimes, sure. But I think we’re taught from the beginning that There Can Only Be One more than we’re not, despite the wider culture tending to think we all live in the same(impoverished) bucket.  The long and short of it is though—for me to be quick, maybe somebody else has to be slow—and that’s, you know, really bad.  We may all have crumbs but it’s really important that I’m better at cataloging them and whatnot(and it’s okay that I’m proud of my quick thinking as long as I don’t have to look down on someone to feel it.) So, I’m giving “Wildflower” another look today and posting this, as well as a sort of challenge to myself and to try to keep the blog honest. There are parts of the disability experience that aren’t that cute, I’m sorry to say.