Growing up with Cerebral Palsy wasn't easy for her. Many people, adults and kids alike, had difficulty accepting her disability and instead of learning more about it, the kids would make fun of her and the adults were no better with their ignorant comments.
In junior and high school, she often felt like "the ugly duckling" because she had a face full of pimples, she walked with a limp, had a left hand with crooked fingers, she wore a big bulky brace on her left leg and orthotic on her right foot, which could easily be seen if she didn't have them covered up enough. She was also called a walking duck and quacked at by her peers because, to them, it looked like she was waddling when she walked. However, as she grew older she realized that ht comments were being made because people were scared to get to know her because in "their" eyes, she was "different" and because of this, she often had a hard time looking int he mirror and seeing anything else but her discrepancies.
She thought it would get better in college, but unfortunately, it didn't, and like high school, she was having trouble dealing with her Cerebral Palsy. However, it was far worse dealing with it in college because in high school she was at least getting good grades. In college, she was failing all her major classes, passing on the electives, and being constantly ridiculed by her peers.
An example of this was when she was living in the college apartments. She had just moved in, and the girls who she was living with were all friends with each other already and she was the “outsider.” If they were in the living room, she was not allowed to be in there with them. She felt like she was in prison. She had been living with these girls for about a month, and she thought everything was going smoothly, but she was wrong! One night, she made the “fatal” mistake of taking her roommate’s pizza box out of the refrigerator and instead of returning it to the fridge, where it was originally, she moved it to the freezer. At the time, she did not realize that the pizza was intended for a party in someone else’s apartment that very night. Her roommates should have told her that they would be removing the pizza, soon and to wait until they took it out, if she had trouble taking it out and then putting it back herself. After all, she wasn’t a mind reader. After she put the pizza in the freezer, she went to bed thinking nothing of it.
A little while later, her roommate came into their bedroom and started screaming at her. Her roommate stated that she had no right to move her stuff and then she started cursing at her. After her roommate left the room, she cried herself to sleep. Her roommate was screaming so much that she couldn’t even defend herself, not that her roommate gave her any chance to speak at all.
The next morning, she walked into the kitchen, and on the refrigerator was a note for her stating that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, she had no right to touch anybody things, and that if she didn’t like things the way they were, then she could just move out. The note also had a bunch of profanities and she was called every name in the book. When she left the apartment that day, she was in tears. She cried all the way to school. On the way to school, she called her mother in tears and told her mom what had happened. Her mom told her not to worry; her mom would take care of everything. Once she got to school, she went to go see the vice president of the academic resource center. She told her to go see the dean of students. When she told the Dean of Students what she had gone through that morning, she was told that she had the option of moving out of that apartment, so she took it.
The second apartment she was moved into, she had a whole new set of problems to deal with. The second set of girls were very nice to her and she lived with them for about three days and she would’ve lived with them permanently, if it hadn’t been for the fact that there were a bunch of stairs that a person had to climb to get into and out of the apartment, which were not safe for her to climb up and down.
After the two experiences that she went through in the 2 previous apartments, she was so desperate for nice roommates that when she was told that once she made her decision, it would final and that there would be no going back once the decision was finalized, she didn’t care. She told the Dean of Students that she wanted to stay where she was, even if it was detrimental to her health and safety.
Her mom was absolutely outraged when she told her what her final decision had been and screamed and cursed her out calling her, “a crazy fucking bitch”. Her mom didn’t understand how important it was for her daughter to have friends and nice roommates. The only thing the mom was thinking about was her daughter’s safety, which to her daughter, at that time, wasn’t important.
After being cursed at by her mom, she then went to the Dean of Students again, and told her that although she was happy living with this group of girls, she had no choice but to move out, because of the issue with the stairs. At first, the dean said that the decision had been finalized and couldn’t be undone. When she told her mom this, she was screamed at again, but no cursing this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment