Most of my adult life I have inwardly scorned the idea of “ableism”, along with a host of other isms that all too frequently appear to be about people shouting,
“Be VIRTUOUS”, without recognising the planks in their own eyes.
But as I continue to survive into my 70th year…
(*click* I almost hear the sound of younger people switching away from this)
I am ever more frequently struck by my own selfishness, not necessarily as a bad thing, but very often a perspective narrowing thing.
This means that I have failed to see some universal truisms that have always applied to me, but I declined to learn about from others - because I had already put them in a virtual box of otherdom.
I have been scared enough of potential personal disasters to actively contemplate them: the loss of faculties, the possibility of paraplegic injury, loss of sight, and hearing destroyed - (surprisingly not yet a reality despite 3 years of photographing loud bands from right by the bass bins).
I’ve done social work training, a lot of it quite enlightening, I even spent time trying to manage in my house blindfolded for a day - to feel what it would be like to try and get around if 100% blind. (It was horrible).
My work in TV and film sound recording gave me a heightened sense of what hearing means, how ten years of life with headphones as the focus of my income changed my brain, making it permanently more sensitive to discerning distant or layered sounds than the average person. And then I have also experienced the humiliating and life changing shock of psychotic mental distress, occasioning a locked hospital ward, loss of lover, home, work, stability, and almost life itself.
In this second season of Trumpian times, I guess many will, like me, observe the ease with which selfishness can be reinforced by an emphasis on free speech, free trade, open competition and the perception of freeloading… whilst also despising the virtue signalling, righteous cancelling, and Orwellian thought policing, that seems to be generally labelled as left/woke. All while quietly contemplating how on earth a Labour government of less than one year’s standing can become one of the most authoritarian neo-liberal conservative forces of my lifetime. I guess that the imperfections of our western world cannot be corrected by left-right wars or the political energy of the ignorant young.
I remember when I was working for a local authority back in the 1990s, inspecting (and occasionally using) disabled toilets that were spreading to all kinds of establishments. I approved of their existence, wished that they were more widely available in much needed public spaces, but then suddenly found that my dad, at 6’1”, with chronic arthritis requiring two crutches for all walking of more than a few steps, was angry at them.
Why? because he could not see to comb his hair in the mirror in the standardised disabled toilet due to the 2’6” square mirror being set at the right height for wheelchair users, but only right for him to see if his dick was hanging out.
What that demonstrated to me was that I was part of the great mass who didn’t grasp the realities of disability, whilst pretending to be going along with the idea that the world was well enough adapted and we should just get on with our free lives as individuals in a what was (is, comparatively), a very caring UK society.
Anyway - now that mirrors in such toilets tend to be full height, and I have the developing arthritis of older age that seems to be unavoidably progressive, - I find that the opposing thumbs that I took for granted are grumbling with pain at every mundane task I ask them to do, from shirt buttons and pulling on socks and boots, to opening jars, carrying plates or pans, and every week’s DIY jobs.
Visions abound - of my Dad shouting, “No, I’m going…” just before his almost successful attempt to get out of a car and apply his crutches on his own, ended with him on his back in the car park.
I see my Mum, puzzled, with fresh blood trickling from her head, having picked at a scab she had forgotten was there, the result of a fall she had forgotten ever occurred…
It’s almost 6 years since mum died - and 16 since my dad was buried.
Like many others I focus on remembering the two of them when they were the happy caring parents of my younger and midlife years, but I am trying harder to remember what it was like, and how it must have felt, to be the increasingly deaf, physically frail, or dementia confused people they became - without losing any of their lovingness or humanity.
This Mothering Sunday, (which I know is a modern twisting of the original Church intention of it all being about the community church as mother), I shall be remembering both mum and dad, whose remains are laid side by side in a green burial ground in Dorset, as the boy scout beating champions of laughing through difficulties.
And I will be mindful of how everyone may be on apparently very different life journeys but the one terminus we are all heading for has a congestion of physical difficulties and other challenges, in the converging tracks of later life, that the young will forever ignore as they skip past every laboured metaphor for ageing.
Then?
Time to go search out some new tracks for my Spotify liked songs list to play as I pop in the Tesla to get some money back from a silly old fashioned garage man, and write the script for the serious movie about ageing that “The Substance” was shockingly unsubstantial about.