There It Is!

By Sylvia Stevens
March 2000

My ex-husband had the goods on being a child. When asked once if he'd like to be a kid again, he replied sharply "Hell, no! Who wants to be short and broke?" Therefore it was with profound relief that I entered adulthood. I may still be short and broke, but I can vote, by God and I can drink! Sometimes that drink is what keeps me from hauling off and biting someone! In my social circle, the visually impaired kids in the Sight Saver classes, it seemed that nobody really wanted to be a kid. What's more, nobody really wanted to *have* kids, either.

"No WAY!" was the response of one of my childhood chums when I asked her whether she and her husband (another of my childhood chums) were planning a family. "I can't STAND kids! Why would I make one of my own?" Perhaps our aversion to 'rugrats' came from our own experiences as children, WITH other children. As handicapped kids, mainstreamed into public school, we got the sharp end of the stick every time. I remember being tripped, called names and generally harassed. Small wonder I don't necessarily want a rematch as an adult. Retaliation then was impossible, now would be unthinkable.

I remember my Auntie Arlene vividly. Her first words to my grandparents when they brought me into her home are etched in my mind. "What are you two doing with... that... child?" She eyed me with trepidation. When I asked my grandmother, who had adopted me when my parents died, why Arlene disliked me, the response was immediate and final: "She's just not used to children." "That's OK!" I piped up in my five year old voice, "Neither am I!" The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Anyone who has tripped over a child they cannot see, had a kid run sticky jam-laden hands over their guide dog's freshly washed and brushed fur, or had a nose-miner try to hitch a ride on the back of their wheelchair knows what I mean. Once, when crossing the floor of a department store, my cane nearly skewered a crawling baby! Now WHY the mother, in all her maternal wisdom, had placed a five-month old crib-cricket on the floor of a busy walkway is beyond me. Had my swinging cane tip actually struck the baby, I KNOW who the villain in the piece would be. Myself. It may take a village to raise a child, but it seems to me that the worst examples of childhood run amok are always the offspring of the 'village idiot'! I know a woman who uses a wheelchair who backed over a small girl's foot accidentally. The little girl set up a shriek and the mother screamed at my friend. Why had the girl been run over? Well, she finally confessed that she had placed her foot behind the wheel to see if it would hurt when the chair went over it. I rest my case.

One Christmas, in a mall, I was looking into a store window, examining the colors and trying to sort out the items by size of blur, when I felt my guide dog shifting around by my side. I had dropped the harness handle while window-shopping. I turned to find a toddler industriously trying to climb onto my dog's back, using the harness as a handhold! The mother was beaming proudly at her little darling... Daddy was busy trying to catch the adorable scene with his video camera! "EXCUSE me!" I snapped at them, "But please take your child OFF my dog!" "Oh..." said the mother in her best Edith Bunker imitation, "We thought you were a display."

Gone are the days when one could be excused from dealing with man-cubs by the simple phrase "Oh, I'm just not used to children". Say that nowadays and you are branded a Charles Manson wannabe. When I was a curtain-climber the rules were simple: Stay out of their way and when you grow up YOU will get to be a curmudgeon, too. When did the rules change?

I note with some relief that none of my childhood friends have sprogged. The girl who did her eyes to look like Cleopatra still has her girlish figure and her eye makeup is still outlandish, thirty years after we graduated from high school. The one who was a Trekkie, wild about Mister Spock, as opposed to Doctor Spock, is still gadding off to conventions all around the country. She has the time, she has the money, she has the freedom. Me, I am still 'not used to children'. Yes, I suffer the slings and arrows of other peoples' impertinent questions and shady assumptions. But the truth of the matter is that I tend to dislike small children for the very same reasons I dislike small dogs. They won't stay out from under my feet, I cannot see them well enough to keep from trampling them, they're shrill and annoying and their 'owners' will NOT keep them on a leash or make them behave! I may be the only human in the world who believes that the five basic commands of childhood are 'Come' 'Sit' 'Heel' 'Stay' and 'NO!'

But then, even with the quiet ones, there's The Stare. Whether you carry a cane, use a chair, have a dog, or need crutches, you've been there, done that. First comes the sensation of invisible beams, like spiders on your skin. Then you turn to find yourself pinned like a bug by the paint-peeling stare of a six-year-old. What IS the proper response? I've never learned it. Try as I might, I cannot imitate the glazed, intent eye-crawl. Trying to catch the parent's attention works only occasionally. And when they do realize their offspring is mentally dissecting you, they only make a bad thing worse! "Stop that! Don't stare." they say and turn away as if you might actually poison their little one with your aura.

Yes, I know the responses by heart. "You were a child once, yourself!" Right, and I have the inside track on the racket, too. The wheel is rigged. If I'd had me as a child, I'd have killed me before I could become old enough to HAVE me! "Children are our future!" Yeah, and I hope you're not as scared by that as I am. 'What if your parents had felt that way?' They did. And the final clincher, supposedly: "Well, I'm certainly glad that a curmudgeon like you DIDN'T have any children." THAT, Honeybunch, makes TWO of us! Yes, the tide is against me. Curmudgeons are out of fashion. Even Mister Wilson in

Dennis the Menace has mellowed. I guess it's up to me to hold the Grouch flag high. There are more of us than you think. W. C. Fields had it right: "Any man who hates kids and dogs can't be all bad!"