undeserving

I wish my mother were still alive she having had to go through such decisions over my younger life with little help from anyone for decisions… they almost killed me on my first surgery and my father had to disconnect my lines and carry me in his arms out of the hospital to hospital for special surgery where they did some experimental treatment to save me from staph aureus septicemia during a surgery for congenital hip reduction which failed …before that I walked unassisted and since I use crutches and barely can walk at all now. My parents were heros and took me far in life what with all they did to push me along. I was the first kid ever to be mainstreamed in my school for all 12 grades. My mother would not permit me to be in the “handicapped” class with the mentally deficient kids. In kindergarten the teacher stormed into the principal’s office refusing to have me in her class because I could not pour the juice when it was my turn and often wet my pants. The principal fired her. It was a long road to where I am. It is only a mother who can make her son into something when all others see him as a loss. In a mother’s eyes her son is perfect; my mother used to tell me that often. She told me god was watching out for me in a special way. Really it wasn’t god; it was her all along. My father was a saint; he dressed me every day of my life until I was 16 years old and insisted on going to the NYU Rusk Institute to learn to dress myself. In a day they taught me to dress completely, sent me to a shoemaker to get zippered shoes, built me a dressing apparatus for assistance, and since there was some time left over, taught me to get up off the ground unassisted in open space using only my own hands and my crutches. Also, they taught me to climb on to a bus, but I never did that. My odyssey was unreal and I never saw it from afar. I was never put amongst handicapped people and never saw myself that way. To this day, I don’t. Now, I permit myself to ride in a wheelchair in airports only. I still have difficulty seeing myself in the light of all the things people must do for me; especially, poor Annie bears so much of that. I am often surrounded by saints. I feel undeserving.