Mama's got eyes in the back of her head... which is good since the front ones are busted

My six-year-old daughter has finally figured out that I'm legally blind. 

"Mama! Mama! Get that wasp!"

"Mama! Mama! What is that up in that tree?" 

"Mama! Mama! Why are people staring at us?" 

Image by Ember Farnam

I've gotten around these issues for years with basic Mama-hacks. Wasps?  Keep the doors closed, skillfully wave towels and keep the baking soda handy.

Things up in trees or across the street?  Ask detailed questions of the child until you can figure out what it is. Teach them letters and numbers early.

People staring?  Sigh.

"Honey, some people are confused when they see someone who is different. They might be staring at my stick or at my eyes. That's okay. They aren't hurting anything."

(What I don't say--yet--is that they might also be staring because we're speaking a foreign language or because our skin tones don't match the way families "should." There are so many reasons to stare. Pick one.)

But now my daughter has got the idea. I've explained,"My eyes don't work very good. If you want me to see things, you have to bring them really really close."

We're currently reading the American Girl books about the Native American girl from our neck of the woods in Oregon, Kaya, and her adopted sister Speaking Rain.  My daughter was a bit confused about why Speaking Rain couldn't run away from the bad guys who captured her when Kaya could. She didn't accept that Speaking Rain had to be led around all the time.

"Mama, you can't see and you run around by yourself anyway," she argued. 

The American Girl books did a decent job on including a blind character, although there are a few points that might be a little unrealistic. Mostly they do well. I try to explain that the girl in the story can't see anything at all. Whereas I can see some. But that is hard for a six-year-old to work out. She looks really confused again. 

And she's not the only one who is confused. It seems like every month or so, someone asks me how I parent while legally blind. So I've decided to set down the issues here for quick reference. There are a few points I'd like to emphasize about blind and visually impaired parenting:

Illustration using a Creative Commons image by Jake Stimpson

1. It isn't impossible, and no, I don't have a nanny or a cleaner or a cook.
2. There are physically hard parts and parenting is possibly the most difficult thing I've ever done in terms of adapting to my vision impairment. (Sighted parents usually say parenting is the hardest thing they've ever done too.)
3. We've never been to the emergency room and my kids have never been injured because I couldn't see a danger.
4. As with everything involving disabilities, the hardest parts are social and coming from other people.

I've built rock walls with my bare hands. I love bicycling. I have hiked in remote areas of the Himalayas alone. I have worked as a newspaper journalist covering the war in Kosovo and Macedonia. I have navigated traffic in Moscow, Russia and Dhaka, Bangladesh alone and on foot, and that should be considered an extreme adrenaline sport. 

I'm not totally blind, but I'm definitely legally blind. And my own personal opinion is that parenting is the single most challenging task I've tried when it comes to the difficulty of adapting it too my vision impairment. It has been harder than all of those other things when it comes to the specific difficulties of a vision impairment. So, yes, there are some difficulties. 

Let's see, here are the physical issues:

• Choking hazards and similar toddler dangers: I had to design my living space so that there simply aren't any choking hazards, sharp objects and medicines within reach when my kids were babies and toddlers. Otherwise my days would have been full of constant worry and mouth sweeping. I quickly learned to tell what my children were doing by sound. While sighted parents would watch their kids and have trouble when they hid under the table to draw on the floor with a sharpie, I listened. I learned to listen for the sounds of pen lids, scissors and batteries rattling on the floor. It only took my toddler cutting up a ten-dollar bill left on the table once before I hid all scissors and all money. I will often be cooking with my hands full and tell my kids in the other room something like, "Bring me those batteries right now, You don't take the batteries out of your toys and batteries aren't toys." My kids ask "Mama, how did you know?" I tell them, "That's a Mama's trade secret." By now I know the sounds made when my kids play with dolls, trucks, sticker books, anything. They may be small sounds but if they're playing with something legitimate, there is always some sound. Utter silence, as all parents know, usually means it's time to check on them. 
• Eye contact and attachment: Eye contact is a big attachment mechanism for infants. They can do it in other ways, but most of these require a lot of physical closeness. So, instead of eye contact I did a lot of snuggling. My children sat on my lap to eat until they were at least two. Food plus physical touch and/or eye contact equals attachment brain chemistry. 
• Physical safety and falls: Gates are a very good thing for toddlers. I can keep toddlers from falling without gates but it is too much work. It makes more sense to gate an area and let the kids loose. Then I can get some cooking done. On the other hand, kids will fall. Sighted parents rarely catch tumbles. I have miraculously caught toddlers vaulting head first off the couch just as many times as my sighted peers. I could feel and hear there the kid was and where he/she was headed. I've also had them crash when I was across the room, just as sighted parents have. I keep a well-stocked first aid cupboard. And my kids are now older and have a good sense of physical safety because they know that it hurts if you do overly risky things.
• Traffic:  I didn't always use a white cane. I traveled around in my twenties and just used sound, luck and speed to get across busy streets. But as I got older I knew the odds were rigged against me. I started using a white cane for traffic safety a few years before I had kids and I have to say to anyone who is legally blind and cane-resistant as I was: If you have kids, you need to get with the stick. Kids don't run very fast when they're little and they don't always listen. Canes make drivers pay a bit more attention and what parent wouldn't want an extra safety device. I taught my kids about the dangers of traffic at a very young age. I still make them hold my hands to cross roads at the ages of four and six, but they are getting rebellious, so I'm teaching them how to cross. Soon they'll probably be holding my hand to keep me from getting run over. 
• Combining strollers and canes: This is a special kind of issue, just one of sheer logistics. If I thought cars and pedestrians would use their brains sufficiently, I would simply attach a cane to the front of the stroller as a signalling device and let'er rip. But in my town the thinking abilities of drivers are not to be trusted with the safety of infants. So, I resort to the somewhat ridiculous method of carrying a cane while pushing a stroller. Obviously the cane is just in the way at that point and not doing me any good in terms of physical navigation, but I mostly need it as a signalling device for traffic anyway. When I approach an intersection, I turn the stroller around and pull it while walking with the cane out in front, to make sure that the drivers can get the message. I have also used a sling and a baby carrier but I have problems with my feet and knees that make long treks while carrying a toddler impossible and then there was the era when I had two toddlers. So, I just used a stroller most of the time. Oddly enough, no one ever seemed to notice that my cane wasn't helping me to navigate. Sighted people usually don't really know much about how white canes are used.
• Deep water: Yes, parents should teach their children about the dangers of deep water early too, as well as teach them to swim early. But unlike drivers, water won't ever "be careful." My kids and I are out and about in nature a lot and there have always been rivers and ponds around.  My approach that I stay very close to a small child around water. And I've learned that sighted parents often underestimate the dangers of water precisely because they think they will be able to see everything. When my son was a baby, I was sitting one day by a noisy rushing river with my husband, toddler and infant. I was changing the diaper and my fully sighted husband was reading while our two-year-old daughter played by the bank of the river. I happened to glance up and see her shadow against the water and then glance back down to tuck in the diaper and then glance up again and her shadow was gone. There was no audible sound at all because the rushing of the water drowned out her scream, but I knew with mother's instinct. I leaped up and launched myself into the river and grabbed her while she flailed in the water. She had already been swept away behind bushes and trees where my husband couldn't see her. The first my husband knew of the problem I already had her. He never saw her go in and because of the noise of the water neither of us could hear her splash or scream. It was only instinct and my attention to the bits of shadow that I can see that saved the day that time. And it emphasized to me that neither sight nor hearing is a guarantee of protection, especially if you take it for granted. The best protection is paying attention and being aware of your surroundings. 
• Finding children: There came a time when my toddlers realized that they could hide from me. This was annoying but never actually dangerous. I did get one of those beepers that sound an alarm when the child gets a certain distance away from you. But I never found it very useful because my kids are too curious and they'd just take the bracelet off and play with it and lose it and only the parent's side of the device beeped, not the child's side. This seemed very odd to me. I would think the child's side would beep but the manufacturer assumed that the need would be for an alarm showing when the child had left a certain radius, rather than a noise identifying where the child was. I could have attached one of those devices for finding keys to my child's clothing, but I generally didn't find the problem to be big enough to merit extraordinary measures, even with fairly independent kids. Now they roam around our dead-end street the way other kids do, out of sight for even the sharpest-eyed parents. 
• Emergency plans:  I never had to use an emergency plan but I have one. If my husband isn't there and I need to take a child to the emergency room, I can call an ambulance or a taxi. I sometimes worry about the issue of getting a child who is too big for a stroller to the pediatrician's office with a bad flu. It's over a mile to walk to our pediatrician but the issue hasn't come up yet. I generally know how to handle the flu at home, so doctor's visits tend to be either routine check-ups. Some people have asked what I would do if our house caught fire. This is a confusing question to me, because when the electricity goes out at night, I am always the one to say, "Everyone calm down. I'll get the flashlights." Then I walk calmly upstairs in the dark and reach into the box with camping supplies and feel around for the flashlights, just as I would in the day time. Obviously when visibility is low, my ability to get around without seeing much is an advantage. I know my home well and if there was a fire, I would have at least as good of a chance of getting me and the kids out as my husband would. 
• Reading aloud:  Okay, Braille readers have got this one over me. One could even get a Braille copy of the book plus a picture book for kids to look at while you read and you'd have less fights over looking at the pictures than other parents. But I don't read Braille. I read very close and I need significant light. It has taken a long time for me to find the perfect way to handle this. I wanted to lie down with a kid on either side of me, the way my mother did, but I simply couldn't position a lamp close enough so that the book doesn't shadow the print from the light, especially with two little heads poking in from the sides, trying to see the pictures. When I'm reading for myself I'm almost always listening to a text-to-speech program or audiobooks. But small children will listen much better if their parent reads and they need the reading to be much slower and more relaxed than most audiobooks. So, I finally found the perfect way for my particular eyes. I positioned an armchair between the heads of their beds with a lamp right behind the armchair and I sit in the chair while they lie down on either side of me. With a little tilt of the book they can each look at the pictures and over the years they have become a lot more patient about that. 
• Dirty faces and wardrobe:  I have enough vision to coordinate my kids clothing fine. Still, there are some issues. Kids have an incredible ability to mess up their clothes and get dirty faces. It's embarrassing to have someone else point out that your child needs his or her nose blown. I carry handkerchiefs and blow them a lot, but its just bound to happen that my kids occasionally have a spot or some snot on their faces and I don't notice for a few minutes. These things are not life threatening. The same goes for spots on shirts or tags hanging of the back of shirts. If you haven't learned to live with imperfection, kids will teach you. The other people who get it are the real friends. I avoid the people who don't get it. 
• Picking up and dropping off: You'll always hear parents complain about driving their kids to music lessons, dance classes and play dates. Driving. Right. They should try it with a backpack and a marginally functional public transportation system. This is the hardest of the physical issues. I have had to slog through snow drifts with two toddlers and a stroller (which is way harder than it sounds) to get my kids to one social activity per week because the city thought that our sidewalks didn't need to be plowed "because everyone drives anyway." Even in good weather, getting my kids to school and to good enrichment opportunities is hard and that's with having a husband who can drive and do some of it. There is a silver lining to the cloud because my kids are in immeasurably better shape than the norm. At four my son can hike eight miles and he just started soccer where he is expected to run non-stop for an hour and a half with kids nearly twice his age, and he keeps up. 

So much for the easy parts of parenting while legally blind. The hard parts are those having to do with other people.

• Getting play dates: I started out with one friend who had a child my daughter's age. But she lives two-hours away. We did play dates but obviously it wasn't constant and my daughter begged for more. We attended mommy-and-me classes whenever we could but the reception we got was far from cordial. Once I was told by another mother, "You are supposed to look at people you already know and let them know you're glad to see them." We never made one friend in three years of local mommy-and-me classes and never enticed someone to come to our house for a play date. I not only don't do eye contact and visual social cues the way other mothers do, my eyes also look odd and move erratically. Obviously motherhood wasn't the first time I ran into social problems due to these issues, but I found that all the problems I had before becoming a mom were magnified once the people I was trying to befriend were other mothers. My theory is that mothers are protective of their children and instinctively reject anyone they feel is strange. While they might want to be tolerant and open-minded at other times of their lives, motherhood makes many of us feel that prejudices are a "better safe than sorry"safety issue.  The result was that for several years my kids had severe cabin fever and wanted more social activity. Now that they are a bit older and attending preschool, they have started to make their own friends. I still get some weird reactions from their friends' parents, but so far I have been able to turn them around. Mostly all I need is a bit of contact to convince others that I am in fact a good person to be friends with. 
• The reactions of people on the street: There are the people who ask, "How dare you get pregnant and risk passing that on to your kids?" and the people who grab my children at intersections because they are afraid that I won't keep them from getting run over by cars. Both are a test of nerves and quick reflexes. Especially when I had babies in a stroller, it seemed like every time I went to town we had some sort of extremely negative encounter and it added a lot of stress to the regular pressures of mother hood. While this may seem small compared to the physical issues of parenting, I have found that the studies about the adverse health effects of social exclusion have a basis in reality. A person's mind and body can only take so much of this before it takes a significant toll.
• People who shove their view that a blind person is not safe with children in my face: There are very few comments I can imagine which are more stressful for a parent than having someone question your fitness to parent or say (or imply) that you aren't safe for children. This issue came up for me most acutely with extended family, both in general discussions and when a situation arose in which one adult would end up watching several other children and chance had it that the adult was me. I have had my fair share of hard knocks in the social world but I was utterly unprepared for the problems to come from those who were close to me and knew me well. My friends and family know that I have never had to take my kids to the ER. I have pulled a silently drowning child out of a swimming pool on three occasions when I was the fastest to react (the first time when I was twelve years old). I have taught preschool and elementary classes for ten years and I have a clean safety record there as well. So, the first time I was told that I was not capable enough to watch other children because of my vision impairment, it momentary knocked the breath out of me. Quickly my reaction changed to anger and then to icy fear.  Yes, fear. For a very simple reason. If, heaven forbid, there ever is an accident while I am watching children, I had been put on notice that I would be blamed specifically. Accidents do happen with children, even when adults are vigilant. But I can't afford to have a child that isn't mine fall and scrape a knee, because it is very possible that others will not shrug and say, "Well, that's part of being a kid," as they might if the babysitter were someone else. Instead there would be specific blame. The result has been that although I am very open to watching other people's children to give my kids more fun, I have to be very cautious about it, because of the prejudices around the issue of my vision impairment. 

It's never a good idea to end on a very negative note, so I'd like to offer a couple of unexpected advantages to parenting while legally blind as well.

• Mama really does have eyes in the back of her head: My kids still can't figure out how I know exactly what they were touching in the other room. I think the whole thing about mothers having eyes in the back of their head is just sighted mothers developing some of the attention to sound that most blind people develop. I can tell very specifically what my kids are doing in the other room, what toy they're playing with and what they're doing with it. I can often multitask and "watch" kids from the other room more effectively than sighted parents because I don't have to be looking to tell what's going on. 
• Lower gross-factor parenting: Kids sometimes do gross things that I'm glad I can't see. My children are not always well-behaved and my daughter has been known to chew up her food and then open her mouth to display it in order to try to annoy adults. She also does a lot of sticking out her tongue and "giving the evil eye" when she's angry (according to my sighted friends). I can now even tell when she is doing these things and I am just as glad to have one less thing to push my buttons. When I was changing diapers the same thing applied. While sighted people ask how I can wipe off gross things without seeing them, I have a hard time understanding why you would want to see them. Just wipe the whole thing several times carefully, so as not to get anything gross onto other objects and have done with it. I can tell if there is something to wipe even through the rag. There is no need to examine the mess too closely.
• Mommy fashions: Fashion is not a hobby of mine. I dress cleanly and presentably and that's the end of it. Sometimes I'll wear a wild scarf or skirt for fun, but I don't want to be in the mommy-glamour contest on at the playground. I know it is going on but I find that I am just as happy to miss out on the whole thing. 

So, what are your parenting challenges? Anything to add or gripe about?  Every parent I know feels a bit over their head. Here's a chance to share. Add your comments below. I always love your comments on these posts.