The following article was published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, on Saturday, 8 August 2009. This is for any of you who might have been wondering...
"Amie Slavin lost her sight in 1997 and has brought up her two daughters by touch. This, she promises, is easier than you might think. Being blind does not make her an incompetent mother – and yet people assume that she must be."
Amie Slavin with her children Sophie (three) and Jihana (15 months). Photograph: Fabio De Paola
"Hard labour, as a lifestyle choice, has more to recommend it than I could have guessed. From those first few hours of holding Sophia, my firstborn, curled on my forearm learning to breastfeed, to the most recent round of pre-breakfast Ride a Cockhorse, bouncing two "fine ladies" on my tired knees, I have been a fan.
But I always knew that parenting would present different challenges for me, compared with more mainstream mothers because I have been blind since 1997.
The practicalities of bringing up children without eyesight are not, for the most part, nearly as hard as you might think. Changing nappies isn't especially difficult if you're used to doing everything by touch. There's no mystery about it. I don't explore faecal matter with my fingers, neither do I leave my baby half-cleaned. I simply use a combination of touch and smell to determine how cleaning is progressing, and if it gets out of hand and I begin to lose the will to live, well, 10 minutes suffices for a bath and change of clothes: foolproof.
Feeding is also achievable, if slightly more exciting. In the early days of weaning, I would collect a spoonful of food with my right hand while lightly resting my left hand on her right shoulder. In this way I could monitor the position of her head and use my thumb to assess the in (and especially out) flow. I didn't aim the spoon directly in but used my fingertips to detect her mouth and its degree of openness.
Next would come the lightning transition from obliquely hovering spoonful to precisely administered tasty mouthful without jabbing the gums, touching the soft palate or twanging the lips or tongue.
Running my household is more complex, yet still not impossible. Recently, for instance, while sorting laundry, I flicked the corner of a duvet cover into Sophia's abandoned water cup, tipping it on to the floor. I reached for the kitchen roll and knocked over a brand new bottle of multi-surface cleaner which, defying its "sealed" status, sloshed its contents liberally over the kitchen's cork tiles.
Throwing kitchen roll on to the spilled water, I set about wiping up the surface cleaner. My wonderfully helpful (and terrifyingly valuable) new guide dog instantly joined in, diving first into the surface cleaner (to my panic) and then, on my rebuff, seizing the water-soaked kitchen roll and dancing off with it.
Flustered and swearing by now, I chased and caught the dog and paper, sending one from the room and the other to landfill; mopped up the surface cleaner, recaptured my laundry and began to congratulate myself on a household crisis averted.
Brimming with competence, I returned to make the supper I should have started half an hour earlier. Deftly chopping three huge garlic cloves in record time and hurling them at the hot pan … I missed completely!
Still, avoidance of these annoying minor disasters is possible by taking extra time and using forethought.
I am working hard to establish good enough relationships with my daughters that they don't get any ideas about taking advantage of my blindness. So far, I've come down hard on Sophia's "I've finished my food but I don't want you to feel," (obviously unfinished food then), and her plaintive aside to her father, "Don't let her touch my wrist because she'll make me wear long sleeves," and it seems to be paying off. I'm hoping to instil in them the understanding that I am able to detect bad behaviour by means more sophisticated than mere eyesight.
I'm unlikely to win future battles with my girls along the lines of "You're not going anywhere dressed like that." I'm actually quite at ease with the reality that they must be taught to respect and value themselves enough to make their own good decisions on dress and behaviour as they grow into their teenage years.
But the most difficult thing to deal with is not changing nappies, or feeding and cooking, or the exhausting minefield of sightless household management (even the most difficult of such things are possible to overcome by letting go of pride sufficiently to ask for help, if all else fails). No, the really difficult and demoralising challenge I face is other people's attitudes to impairment in general, and to blind parents in particular.
There aren't many blind parents and we are consequently marginalised. My health visitor tells me that while she can easily get me the free Book Start pack in any of 26 languages, there is no possibility of getting it in braille/print, a combination of print and pictures with braille text that allows blind parents to read with sighted children. There is, in fact, no source of such books for sale in the UK, despite the fact that they are relatively easy to produce.
Equally shocking to me was the absence of any of the NHS pregnancy and birth information in either braille, audio or electronic formats. I embarked on motherhood blind, in more than one sense.
B ut all of this pales into insignificance when compared with the way people treat me. Traffic slows down to watch me walking with my guide dog and children. Strangers, and even friends, will seize the slightest chance to ask my husband if I can cook and change nappies. People gawp shamelessly every time I wipe a nose or tie a shoelace and openly express surprise that I am not oblivious to my children's actions when they are not physically attached to me.
As Sophia grows bigger and cleverer, the suspicion among the general public that she is my carer is becoming almost tangible. Just last weekend, for instance, her adherence to the highway code prompted an admiring comment from a passer-by. I turned to smile at the onlooker, pleased that our road safety training was being appreciated, only to find the words being hurriedly bitten back, the person moving swiftly away, as they apparently drew the conclusion that the careful road-crossing was not for my three-year-old's benefit, but for mine.
I am regularly quizzed about my ability to feed and clean my children, the sceptical tone of the questioning barely concealing the suspicion that it's really my husband who does everything. Some people will even ignore my girls' cries for mummy, assuming that, with a mother like me, they must be meaning daddy (which has led, on several occasions, to a gratifying clarification as their screams intensify until they are returned to me).
The truth is that some aspects of blind parenting are a frustrating slog. It is, of course, harder for me than it is for other mothers to do all sorts of things. This is life as I know it, though. I am not surprised by struggle and difficulty. They are old adversaries for anyone determined not to be excluded from life by a severe
disability.
There are bonuses too, such as my older daughter's burgeoning vocabulary, born of the necessity to make her meaning clear to me, and the extraordinary gentleness my reared-by-touch babies regard as the norm.
The only real killer is the assumption that I must be a lonely inadequate, incapable of functional living and normal
family life. Sometimes, when I tell people about my children in their absence, I sense a moment's pause while they try to decide if it can be true that I have children. There is a drawing back, as though I may be in the grip of psychosis. The pause will end with a querulous countering: "But you can't see. How can you have kids?", as though I may not be aware that I am blind.
This was summed up for me recently when, escaping the mayhem of a family Saturday at home, I slipped out for an hour's quiet shopping. Lurking guiltily around the designer perfumes, I overheard a woman telling her child (with no attempt to lower her voice) how lovely it was for me to have a guide dog as, "It's company for her."
My response to this was, I confess, somewhat crisp."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/08/blind-motherhood-disabilitye
Miriam on an exploratory mission in her winter woolies.
Family picture in front of the St. Marks Lighthouse on the Florida gulf coast. It was the coldest Florida winter in many years.
Miriam on Daddy's lap.
Miriam playing with her new friend, the neighbor's doggy under the Christmas tree.
Nicholson girls: (from left to right) Rebecca, Louise, Geneal, and Melissa.
Me and Miriam on the headland above Fraser Beach.
Here is a happy Miriam with Grandad at Lakes Beach.
Picture: Joe, Louise, and three-day-old baby Miriam--Just home from the hospital 10-10-2009.
Amie Slavin with her children Sophie (three) and Jihana (15 months). Photograph: Fabio De Paola
This is the Detroit Renaissance Center on the Riverwalk where we stayed.
This is me with my Cambodian/Californian friend Terri Rupp who is due to have a baby a few weeks after me. She's married to a fire-fighter and they live in Vegas but we were once neighbors at the Louisiana Center for the Blind.
This is me at lunch with my buddies Heath, the country boy from Louisiana, and Deja my old friend from Utah. I was feeling under-dressed.
Thanks girls! I'm so blessed to have so many wonderful family members and friends.
