July 9, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
There’s something wrong with us. We kvetch all winter long about the cold, yearning for the first hot, humid days of summer and then – when they finally get here – we scurry inside and crank up the air-conditioning while we complain to one another about the ungodly heat.
Every year, I make a promise to myself in the dead of winter – when I’m huddled in front of my fireplace under a blanket – that I won’t so much as mention the perspiration gathering in my folds if Mother Nature will please just make it warm. When she finally complies, I’m the first one to start moaning.
And like many people I immediately submit to the most contradictory of heating/cooling behaviours.
In the winter, with the winds howling outside, I keep my house at an even 72 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a comfortable temperature, which means I don’t need to wear my furry coat and fingerless gloves to type my column. In the summer, with the mercury in the thermometer outside climbing steadily, 72 degrees is somehow way too hot. Sixty-eight is reasonable, which means I don’t have to strip down to my unmentionables to type my column.
In the winter, I run from my heated home, to my heated car, to my heated office before my breath has a chance to crystallize.
In the summer, I do the reverse: run from my air conditioned office to my air conditioned car to my air conditioned house before my upper lip has a chance to bead with sweat.
To heck with smelling the roses. If I can’t see them from the comfort of my cool living room, they don’t exist. And as for winter sports? Unless reading in front of a roaring fire is considered a feat of athleticism, it ain’t happening.
I’m a creature of comfort.
I hate to be cold, but I don’t like to be hot, either. With the exception of a few short weeks in spring and fall, I’m impossible to please.
And that’s the problem with this country. It’s a land of extremes. It’s either sub-zero or sweltering.
Which means that outings at any time of the year require careful consideration, and a realistic balancing of the pros and cons. Is it worth risking the potential for heat stroke to take Stephie to the zoo for a few hours? Is it worth risking frostbite to take a few runs down the toboggan hill with my nephews who are visiting from out of town?
At least in the summertime we don’t have to factor in the hazards of slippery driving before we decide whether to venture out of doors.
And at least our hairless cats are happy. In fact, they’d be happiest if we just went ahead and turned off the air conditioner altogether.
They spend the lazy, hazy days of summer in our loft, where it gets nice and steamy, curled up on their fleece blankets. In the evening, they cuddle together on my lap elevating my core temperature by at least five degrees as I slave away at the keyboard with the overhead fan blowing around the stale air in a vain attempt to create a cooling breeze. At night, they cuddle up in bed with us, purring with contentment, little fuzzy hot water bottles, making us sweat and fidget.
Calamity Jane and Macy Gray would love to get outside and experience real heat for once. The closest they get is the slash of sunshine on the front hall mat before I slam the door shut to keep in the cool air. They jump back in dismay, immediately begin to shiver and stare at me with their chilly alien eyes like I’m some kind of mammalian moron, dreading the day when they will have to wear their ridiculous little sweaters around the house just to stave off hypothermia.
July 9, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
If you ever want exceptional government service, just write a nasty newspaper column.
The June 10 edition of The Scugog Standard was still warm when I received a call on my cell phone from the Deputy Director, Retail Services Branch, of ServiceOntario.
Somebody had brought Ms. Barton a copy of my column, ‘X doesn’t mark the spot,’ which was a rant about the callous and infuriating treatment we had received at ServiceOntario the week previous when trying to renew Stephie’s health card.
Ms. Barton apologized profusely for our experience, explaining that the customer service reps are trained to be vigilant but that there are systems in place to deal with exceptions such as ours (an individual with disabilities who is not able to sign legal documents). What happened to us, she said, should never have happened.
Ms. Barton gave me her cell phone number and told me to call to arrange my next visit so she could ensure the process would go smoothly. She followed up a week later with another call. This was customer service at its finest, but I worried about all the other people who had been similarly mishandled by ServiceOntario staff and had no public recourse. How would they get their issues resolved?
Correspondence from Ms. Barton helped to answer that questions. Her e-mail read in part:
“…our manager at the Oshawa ServiceOntario Centre … has already met with our staff to discuss your experiences during your last visit…. ServiceOntario is really trying to transform the way that the public interacts with government. Customer Service is our key priority and we are working with all our staff to try and understand when they can use discretion in the processing of any transaction. We balance this with our need to also ensure the integrity of the process and associated policies. We take it very seriously when any client has a poor experience with any of our Customer Care Representatives, and we work very hard to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
The program manager at the site even contacted me. In her e-mail, Ms. Chalmers apologized for our poor experience. To make sure it didn’t happen on our return visit, she planned to meet us at the greeter’s station, give us a priority ticket and introduce us to an agent who had been advised to forgo the signature requirement in this instance.
I was beginning to feel a bit like royalty instead of an ordinary taxpayer, and it felt good. It came to me, suddenly, that this is how every interaction with the government should feel. We are, after all, the customer – and government employees are paid by us to serve us.
Consider for a moment, advice from the Disney Institute, which has elevated customer service to an art form. I recently attended a conference at which DI’s Mary Flynn made three very salient points about Disney World’s flawless approach to treating its guests:
1. Our customers are not always right, but we must allow them to be wrong with respect.
2. If our customers have a problem, for heavens sake, help them. It may not be our fault, but it is our responsibility.
3. We don’t build it for ourselves. We build it for our customers.
Embracing these three guiding principles will help any service industry develop a culture of exceptional customer care.
To its credit, ServiceOntario seems to be trying. Our return visit went off without a hitch, Stephie’s card should be in our mailbox, signature free, in two weeks and in closing, Ms. Chalmers wrote in her e-mail: “Customer feedback is critical in helping us identify issues and to resolve them for our customers.”
My advice? If you’ve got a problem, make sure someone other than the person behind the counter knows about it. Write a letter. Make a phone call. Give ServiceOntario the chance to make things better for you and everyone else who walks through the door.
I just hope the red-faced man who stormed past us on Friday and hissed, “I guess you can’t even die in Ontario,” will read this column and take action.
June 24, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
Until recently, I have always considered it a blessing that my daughter Stephanie is still in possession of her antiquated red and white health card. At 18, however, and with no prospect of ever receiving her drivers licence, Stephie is without photo identification. And she looks about 12.
One of the implications of this was brought home on opening day at the new Shoppers in town. We were among the first customers and for good luck, I asked Stephie to pick out a lottery ticket at the checkout. The cashier requested some photo identification as proof of age. Stephie began to cry. I told Stephie not to worry, I’d just buy the ticket. But because the cashier had “overheard our conversation,” she wouldn’t sell me the ticket either. I’m not sure about the finer points of this preposterous bit of legislation, but we left the store with Stephie in hysterics and me certain the next guy in line was going to buy my fortune for a lousy three bucks.
In the parking lot, I resolved to make the trip in to Oshawa the very next week and get Stephie a photo health card. It seemed like a reasonable goal, but when you have a child with special needs you learn to anticipate the inevitable wrinkle in every well-ironed plan.
At home, I logged on to the ServiceOntario web site and downloaded the Health Card Renewal form. To make doubly sure I had all my bases covered, I called the 1-800 number to verify the documents I would need: birth certificate, a letter proving Stephie’s address and something with her signature. I explained that Stephie is developmentally disabled and has no signature and was assured the other documentation would be sufficient. The hair stood up on the back of my neck, but we nevertheless stopped in at the Oshawa Centre on our way to Stephie’s neurology appointment in North York last Friday, timing everything to the minute and allowing an extra hour for government inefficiency.
After waiting just a few minutes, we were called to a counter. It was at once a miracle and an dark omen.
The woman sitting opposite us was formidable looking, but I smiled brightly into her cranky civil servant face and launched into my explanation about Stephie having no photo identification. The customer (dis)service representative rudely cut me off. “I don’t need to see photo identification.” She was missing the point entirely, but I decided to let it go for the sake of expediency.
I presented the woman with Stephie’s red and white health card, her birth certificate and a letter from the bank clearly printed with her name and address.
“This isn’t good enough. Do you have her latest ODSP cheque?” Yes, I carry her disability pension cheques around in my wallet for weeks, uncashed, because we don’t need the money. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” I said pleasantly. “But I do have this letter addressed to Stephanie from the Government of Canada.” Apparently our government is as untrustworthy as our financial institutions.
By this point, Stephie was flapping like a goose and my own agitation was apparent. The witch relented and accepted the documents ‘conditionally.’ Then she dropped the bomb. “I need to see something with her signature.” She doesn’t have a signature. “Library card?” Yes, she has a library card, but I signed it for her. She doesn’t have a SIGNATURE. “Bank card?” Uh-huh. She has a bank card, but she can’t sign it. She DOESN’T HAVE A SIGNATURE. “She’ll have to apply for a new card.” AND DO WHAT WITH IT? SHE DOESN’T HAVE A SIGNATURE! “Get her to mark the card with an ‘x’.” WHY DON’T I JUST GIVE HER CARD TO THE CRACK ADDICT OUTSIDE AND GET HIM TO MARK IT WITH A F—–G X?!
I suddenly understood why decent, hard-working people go postal in government offices. I simply peppered the room with a round of high-volume expletives, snatched back my documents, grabbed Stephie by the arm and stormed into the waiting elevator where I continued to swear and throw things around. I felt a little sorry for the other customers waiting for their turn, but they would soon be sympathetic.
In the aftermath, I’m teaching the cats to mark their litterbox with an ‘x.’ When they get the hang of it I’ll let them loose on Stephie’s bank card and try again.
June 24, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
Is it just me or does anyone else feel the current pesticide ban was perhaps a little ill-conceived? I used to have a beautiful, lush lawn. Now, I have a beautiful, lush dandelion patch.
There was a time when I would have considered this a selling feature. At one of our country homes I deliberately cultivated knee-high weeds because they were a haven for bees. And you know what’ll happen if bees go extinct, right? Scientists predict we’ll last two years before we starve to death.
I raised bumblebees when I was a student at the University of Toronto. My zoology professor was a bee researcher/keeper and he had an apiary in his office. He left the windows open and the bumbles would just come and go as they pleased, flying out to do their work and back in, with pollen sacks bulging, to feed their colony. I developed quite an affinity for them and to this day I speak to them fondly as they buzz past me. I was never stung; not while balancing on a ladder with my head in the cherry blossoms harvesting queens from the uppermost branches or removing the cozy pollinators from their special nesting boxes with a pair of tweezers so we could change their bedding. And I learned a terrific party trick along the way. Because the drones don’t sting, my fellow apiologists would fill their mouths with a handful of fuzzy males and then open wide to say hello, spilling insects into the room, much to the startlement of the other guests. They were a fun bunch of guys.
I transferred this love of bees to my ‘estate lot’ outside of Ottawa and while I was thrilled with the wild sanctuary I created and proud that I was doing my part to save humankind, my neighbours – with their immaculate lawns carved into checkerboard patterns – didn’t share my passion for urban wilderness or appreciate my civic-mindedness. So disdainful were they of my colourful ecolawn that I was eventually strong-armed into buying a riding lawn tractor. Unfortunately for the bees, I learned to love that, too, and spent hours manicuring my two acres with my mighty blade.
When I moved to Whitby, I made the natural leap onto the pesticide bandwagon and mowed my suburban postage stamp on a diagonal like a good little neighbour.
I didn’t like the idea of pesticide use, but I didn’t like the idea of being ostracized, either. So when that green and yellow truck drove into the neighbourhood to spray our slice of cookie-cutter heaven, I grabbed the kids and hightailed it for the countryside, where things smelled like manure not brain poison.
Now that pesticides are banned, I can almost hear my cells thanking me for keeping at least a few carcinogens at bay. But I can hear my lawn screaming for a little Chlorthal dimethyl.
Uncultivated lawns are the collateral damage in the war on chemicals. There was a time when a single dandelion was an eyesore; an ugly interloper that was pounced upon and viciously uprooted with the Fiskars Deluxe Telescopic Stand-Up Weeder as soon as it reared its ugly head.
Not even the Fiskar is man enough for this job. No sooner do I pluck one Jurassic plant out of the lawn than another appears. I’m beginning to think they’ve discovered a way to spontaneously germinate.
Grass is becoming an endangered species. I’m thinking of making a plaster cast of the few blades that remain in my yard so I can show my great-grandchildren what it looked like.
Of course, not every lawn in the neighbourhood is as unruly as mine. There are cheaters among us. I suspect anyone with an impossibly thick, green retro-lawn cashed in their investments to stockpile weed killer when they heard about the impending ban. Now they sneak out their secret stash in the middle of the night and spray it on their happy grass when the pesticide police are sleeping.
Me? I’m going to embrace my inner flower child and make dandelion wine while the sun shines.
June 24, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 2 Comments
As far as pets go, I’ve had lots of luck – all of it bad.
JUSTWRITE! readers will remember Bob – our failed guide dog (key word: failed). He was a lovely boy but a liability for an autistic child. And yet, Bob barely registers on the Richter Scale when it comes to Coveart animal disasters.
My pet obsession started shortly after I was married. My spouse and I had a heated argument about adopting a kitten from the Humane Society in Ottawa and he got out of our little Dodge Colt and left me in the middle of a busy downtown intersection. I taught myself to drive standard that day and brought home a little tabby named Pumpkin. I surprised Jonathan – who was ill and in no position to argue (a three hour walk home with no jacket, perhaps?) – with Tankard two days later. Fluffy, orange and irresistible, Tank’weird’ was hand-picked by my sister-in-law, a vet, and had such a high fever that he suffered permanent brain damage.
Years later, I welcomed a feline waif into our home, who thanked me by depositing a large clutch of blood-sucking fleas in my baby boy’s bed. My husband compared me to Mother Theresa, somehow making it sound less than complimentary. Undaunted, I took in a pregnant stray who gave us six lovely kittens, two of which I simply couldn’t part with.
There are too many others to count … A feral kitten, Anakin Skywalker, from an auction house. The Force was not with this ferocious little Jedi, who disappeared into the wilderness. Sam and Monty – rescues – had wanderlust and a stress disorder respectively. Sam went walkabout when we were in Florida and was hit by a car; Monty died of an acute anxiety attack while we were in Nova Scotia. Spice Girl, another rescue ‘who might not get along well with other animals,’ hissed, spit and clawed her way into someone else’s heart. And Smokey Joe, a shelter kitten, developed ear cancer at the tender (and expensive) age of just six months.
At some point, I started adding dogs into the mix. We trialed a rotweiller/shepherd cross named Pluto. She had a urinary tract infection and doused our brand new carpets with several gallons of blood-stained piddle when she wasn’t pinning my two-year-old son to the ground and sticking her foot-long tongue down his throat. She went back to the pound the next morning. Barker, a pet shop pup, came next, her name being the first indicator of trouble. She so terrorized baby Patrick that he refused to be put down for fear of mauling. Renamed Toby, she went to our caregiver, Granny Helen, and produced eight little barkers of her own. Next came Frisco, an adorable little worm-infested beagle who continually ran away from home. He went to live with a friend in the country, where he was killed chasing a school bus. Bob was next, and you know his story (except the part where he broke my wrist). Porsche, our first pug, developed mange, lost her mind, bit a neighbour child and went back to her breeder. Buddy, the quivering shih-poo, was guaranteed to be the ideal companion for Stephanie. He had such a horror of homo sapiens and terra firma that I had to carry him around in a snuggly. He was another breeder repo.
Convinced the right pet was out there somewhere, I tried another pug. Finally, success! Archie Gordon was completely disobedient and his nose wrinkle left black mung on every vertical surface, but he was sweet. Until I brought home Monty the boxer/mastiff cross, a sympathy pet store purchase. Archie became food defensive and bit me in the face. Monty went to a family grieving for their deceased boxer lookalike. Archie went to a doting childless couple when my husband and I at long last separated.
I did go dogless for a few years before succumbing to the impish charm of a pug-shih named Wookie, who turned out to be a vicious little biter. He lives with an elderly couple, who lock him in the basement when their grandkids visit.
Ever the optimist, I recently bought two hairless kittens. The fact that both our sphynx will require vitamin supplementation for life (Calamity Jane suffers from irritable bowel syndrome and little Macy Gray appears to have feline herpes) can’t diminish my joy at finding the perfect pets. Conveniently packaged as cats with a dog’s personality and the added bonus of being shedless, they are the most loving, cuddlesome and entertaining creatures I have ever had the pleasure of owning. And let’s face it. If they weren’t somehow defective, they wouldn’t be living in my house – even briefly.
June 24, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
You know you’re getting old when the words ‘general admission’ fill your heart with dread.
When Rob found out that UK trip hop duo Massive Attack was playing the Sound Academy in Toronto on the weekend, he was ready to trade the cats for a pair of tickets. We logged on to Ticketmaster and (hallelujah chorus) there were tickets available. I clicked ‘best available’ and it wasn’t until we’d parked the car on the shores of Lake Ontario Sunday night that Rob mentioned there was no assigned seating – or seating of any sort. It was a general admission venue.
As I stood in line with hundreds of other fans I felt a cold finger of anxiety knock against each knuckle of my vertebrae. I’ve lived in a cultural vacuum for the past 23 years raising my kids in small town Ontario so I’m not intimate with the club scene but I do remember a thing or two about general admission.
I once went to see the Boomtown Rats at a small high school stadium. It was shortly after more than a dozen general admission ticket holders had been trampled to death at a Who concert in Cincinnati, so the swarming masses – with visions of suffocation dancing in their heads – were surprisingly well-behaved. We had lined up all night for a chance to stand in the front row and have Bob Geldof spackle us with his spittle and because that concert came off without a hitch it gave me a false sense of security.
Years later, by then a mom with tiny dependents and an acute sense of my own mortality, I went to another concert armed with a general admission ticket. This was an outdoor affair in Ottawa and the headlining band was The Tragically Hip. Giddy with momentary freedom, we arrived at the stadium bright and early to get within touching distance of the band. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but by late afternoon the crowd was hot and unruly and firehoses had to be employed to stave off heat exhaustion. It didn’t work for a few folks, who were carted away on stretchers before The Hip even hit the stage, but they were the lucky ones. As soon as Gord Downie opened his mouth, the crowd turned into a seething mob that surged as one great beast toward the stage. We were swarmed, then crushed and separated, our feet no longer touching the ground, swept away on a pulsing tide of Hipsters. With the exception of childbirth, I have never felt more out of control of my own body. It was terrifying and I swore from that moment on that if the ticket didn’t have a seat number printed on it, I wasn’t going.
Of course, by the time I found out the truth about Sunday it was too late. My purse had been searched, I had been cuffed with a 19+ wristband (sadly without being asked to show my ID or frisked for weapons) and I found myself once again at the front of a crush of people, this time ready to watch Rob cross an item off the top of his bucket list.
At 8 p.m. we made our way to the railing in front of the stage where we would be standing for the next five hours. I immediately began to entertain the notion of fainting. Menopausal and grossly overdressed, I was perspiring profusely and wondered if this was the hip, topless kind of crowd. I was fairly certain I had bad breath and was suffering from a crippling gas pain. We were standing on a metal grate and my bunion began to throb. I weight-shifted every three to four seconds to prevent my legs from cramping. I was so dehydrated I briefly considered drinking my own urine. Holding my free clammy hand (the other had a death grip on the railing), Rob asked me if there was any way I could try not to be so crazy.
As it turns out, my anxiety was unfounded. No one even brushed against me much less jostled me (the BO, the bad breath, the flatus or the just the smell of my terror?) The crowd was a little older and clearly there were enough people in attendance who remembered Cincinnati.
And Massive Attack? No panic attack could have been massive enough to keep me away. I excreted a few bricks but they ROCKED.
April 29, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
Is it wrong that my favourite place on earth is Disney World?
I asked that question of Disney Institute’s Mary Flynn the other day as she was setting up for her presentation to the Ontario Long Term Care Association convention I was attending wearing my editor’s hat.
Disney World is the mecca of family holidays and as parents, the successful upbringing of our children seems to hinge on whether or not we’ve made the pilgrimage at least once.
An OLTCA colleague, Meredith, said she knew she’d married the right man when they were preparing to leave the park with their two young boys last year and her husband said he was sad to be going home.
You can buck commercialism all you want, but something magical happens there.
First of all, it’s probably the cleanest place on earth. I’d sooner eat off the cobbled stones of Main St. USA than my own kitchen table.
Walt Disney was a visionary – “Who else would build a Gothic castle in the middle of a swamp?’ posited Mary – and the 63,000 ‘cast’ members who work at the park (making it the largest single site employer in the Western Hemisphere if not the world) are still following his dream.
Walt was not afraid to stand at the edge of a cliff and jump – with or without a parachute. He survived bankruptcy and fought off the demons of mental illness in the pursuit of his vision: a mouse named Mickey who would capture the hearts (and wallets) of a nation and then a planet. And boy did he get that one right. When Mary Flynn stood on the stage the other day and spelled out M-I-C, 1,400 healthcare delegates sang K-E-Y … M-O-U-S-E. Mickey mouse is not just an icon, he’s a household name and his theme park is the most popular playground in the world.
I first went to Disney World as a kid with my folks. We drove to Florida in our camper and stayed at Fort Wildnerness Campgrounds. That was magical in itself. It was there that I saw my first armadillo, my first palmetto bug (a flying cockroaches the size of your hand) and my first public swimming beach that had to be cleared by dusk because the alligators took over.
What I remember most about the park was Space Mountain, a roller coaster in the dark. My dad was so terrified that he had to drink himself into a coma before he would allow himself to be strapped into one of those little white bullets. Then he screamed like a girl the whole time.
It was so much fun we had to come back with my grandma a few years later. She neither drank excessively nor screamed, although I think she might have wanted to do both after standing in the lineup for It’s a Small World for an hour and hearing that song roughly 45,000 times.
Shortly after I got married, my mom and dad took my husband and me on a trip to Fort Wilderness, although I suspect he was the one person in the world who did not fall under Disney’s magical spell. I was 22 at the time and just as entranced as I had been as a child. As soon as our two boys were old enough, I packed them onto an airplane and headed for Orlando, staying in a Disney hotel – All Star Movies – for the very first time. They dragged me onto The Tower of Terror and the Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster and I was alternately hysterical and violently ill, but it was the trip of a lifetime.
A few years later, my mom and I took Stephie. While many people love Disney, Stephanie lives it. Simba the Lion King is her best friend and, although she was originally horrified at the lifesize, lifelike version of all her favourite animated pals, by the last day of our trip she was searching out plushy characters like I search out Coke. If there is a heaven – as far as Stephie’s concerned – Disney built it.
Am I a slave to Walt’s capitalist empire? You bet, but I pound on his doors willingly. Many of my happiest memories were manufactured by Disney and I have Mickey albums stuffed full of photos of me having the best time of my life with my kids. I may never have enough money to go anywhere else but I’m already saving up for my next trip to Disney, when I have grandchildren to sprinkle with pixie dust.
April 23, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
Judging from the response to my daughter Stephanie’s column last week, I could soon be out of a job – or at the very least work-sharing with an 18-year-old autistic writer.
Stephie was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to her community newspaper – and even more thrilled to know that people were truly appreciative of her contribution. A special moment, indeed, for a person with multiple disabilities who was never expected to walk or talk, let alone scribe an article that would appear in print for thousands of people to read.
Like most of the township, we attended the Scugog Spring Garden Show this past Saturday at the Community Centre and it’s probably a good thing we arrived after Frankie Flowers made his appearance or he might not have been speaking to a capacity crowd. Stephanie was greeted as a celebrity, something that made her blush with pride while studiously avoiding eye contact. I was astonished at the number of people who came up to her to shake her hand and congratulate her on a job well done.
She was ostensibly at the show to man The Scugog Standard booth and help to sell tickets for a quilt that will be raffled off in support of Nestleton Camp – which she attended last summer with much media fanfare – but she spent so much time talking to her admiring public that she didn’t push much product. If she had a signature – or could even reliably spell her first name – I’m sure she would have been happily signing autographs by the end of the day.
When Rik first laid eyes on Stephie’s column (which was three times as long before I whittled it down to fit in the space allotted, cutting out such delightful non-sequiturs as “I like drawing with chalk” which came out of nowhere and humble assertions like: “How could there be a child more perfect than me?”) he accused me of writing it myself. Especially the part where she sings my praises in a voice I have never before heard her use. But it was all Stephie. Every beautiful word.
And it moved people. Perhaps because we have been conditioned to expect little from youth with disabilities and it surprises us that they are capable of so much.
I received a phone call today from a lovely lady in Seagrave who said that Stephie would make a wonderful spokesperson for Autism Ontario because she is so articulate and genuine.
And a Letter to the Editor appeared on my desk from Virginia Bambrick, who wrote:
I found the column written by Stephanie Coveart in last week’s paper to be enlightening, humorous and very enjoyable. She obviously has inherited her mother’s skill at expressing herself in a most delightful way.
(I don’t know who was more flattered, Stephie or me. I will be sending Virginia a cheque, at any rate.)
With all the tests and diagnoses and doctors appointments and medications and therapy sessions – not to mention terror and utter fatigue – associated with Stephie’s early years, it took me some time to realize that my baby was a rare and precious gift, and that what she could do far outweighed what she couldn’t.
As another parent of a daughter with special needs once said to me, “At least we’ll never have to worry about them coming home on the back of a Harley.”
It’s true. But it’s so much more than that.
Born into a world that often seems evil and despairing and doomed to destruction, Stephie somehow remains good and sweet and pure and faithful and honest. And every time I look at her smiling face or watch her flap in excitement at the flight of a butterfly or am the lucky recipient of one of her fierce hugs or hear about her plans for a better world where no cats are set on fire by teenage boys, she gives me hope and the courage to keep believing.
April 23, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 2 Comments
When my daughter was born almost 19 years ago, autism was a continent that wasn’t even widely recognized, much less explored.
It was in 1943 that Dr. Leo Kanner first described autism as a unique condition. He believed the cause was cold, unloving mothers. Fortunately for the moms of autistic children everywhere, our understanding of the brain has come a long way in the last 50 years. We now know that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurobiological condition that affects the normal development of the brain and causes communication problems, impaired social interactions, a noticeably restricted repertoire of interests and activities and a tendency to repeat specific patterns of behaviour. Children with autism are also more likely to suffer from other conditions, including developmental delay, epilepsy, Tourette’s and ADD.
Although there were countless times when I wanted to wear a T-shirt printed with the disclaimer ‘I’m not a bad mother … my daughter is autistic’ I think most people are beginning to realize that rather than love our children less, mothers with autistic kids love them – if possible – even more, or at least more fiercely.
I’ll never forget the day when a head pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario sat me down in his office after a battery of tests and told me that my daughter was mentally retarded. It was just another nail in the coffin of my little girl’s ‘ordinary’ life, but it was still a shock. I’m sure he was fired shortly afterwards for his political incorrectness.
In addition to being globally developmentally delayed (the new mentally retarded), Stephie developed a devastating seizure disorder at 18 months and was diagnosed with autism at six years of age, one year before she toilet trained. She screamed 23½ hours a day until she learned to crawl, at which point she started smiling – even when she was having a seizure every 10 seconds. The smiling has never stopped. She is the happiest person on the planet (unless there is a change of plans) and she spreads her joy like jam on toast.
As a toddler, Stephie focused exclusively on animals (she still does – thank you/curse you Walt Disney for your ever-expanding catalogue of animated animal films) and lived in ‘the tiny pink world that mommy bought.’ She liked to run away, did not want to be touched, had no fear of anything but gravity, watched TV with her face an inch from the screen, made little or no eye contact, could not make sense of the mechanics of conversation, failed to pick up on social cues, banged her head for hours at night to put herself to sleep and flapped in excitement like a crippled bird who might by some miracle become suddenly airborne.
Stephie still bangs, flaps and averts her eyes, but she sticks to me like crazy glue and craves my hugs and kisses. She cannot consistently spell her own first name but she talks like a scholar and knows her Disney movies so well that she has even worked herself into the script and altered the dialogue accordingly. She can’t find her way to her grandparent’s house around the corner, but she knows the name and breed of every dog we’ve ever met on the street. She can’t ride a bike or catch a ball but she’s been involved with the Durham Therapeutic Riding Association (DTRA) for 14 years and there is nothing more beautiful than that girl on a the back of a horse, tall and proud and smiling her dazzling smile. She calls her brain Shirley and when she’s having a particularly dim day she just laughs it off and explains that Shirley has gone to Cuba for a vacation (often with her shrimp children in tow, whoever they are).
What we would give to be Shirley just for a day. To see the world through Stephie’s kind eyes. To know what she knows. To love so completely. To live so innocently. To have the capacity to experience pure joy on a daily basis.
April is National Autism Awareness Month. It is a time for people with an autistic child to celebrate. And it is a time for people who have never been exposed to the inexplicable gifts of autism to try to understand and above all to accept. Brains like Shirley are found in as many as six in every 1,000 children and as neuroscientists begin to understand more about the autistic mind, they are going to discover complexities of learning that they never thought possible. Autistic children have so much to teach us and I, for one, can’t wait to learn. Stephie and I will take this journey together and I can’t imagine a better travelling companion.
To get the scoop on autism from the source, watch for next week’s column, dictated by guest columnist … Shirley!
April 23, 2010 - Posted by colleengreen34 - 0 Comments
Of all the bad pictures that have been taken of me – and there are plenty – the one on the cover of last week’s Scugog Standard in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day is probably the worst. No offence to the photographer, who’s won national awards for his work behind the lens, but you’re only as good as your subject and there’s not much Rik could have been expected to do with one of his staffers who looked like an androgynous, overweight, big-eared, drunken leprechaun.
In truth, I didn’t even want to be in that photo. I just wanted to drink free green beer on production day. I am cursed with the face of a puppet and I wasn’t wearing any makeup or earrings. What I was wearing was a shiny green cardboard hat from the dollar store … and those things do nothing for your features. Cindy Crawford couldn’t have pulled off that look. Sometimes, nothing is worth the price of a free green beer. Not even on production day.
By the time I got back to the office, Rik was already fuming. “Don’t you say one word about this picture!” he hollered. “In 60 per cent of these photos your eyes are closed and in the other 40 per cent they’re almost closed.” (It’s an involuntary flash reaction. You’d have to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks to keep them from snapping shut.)
Since I couldn’t say anything to Rik, who, bless his little editor’s heart, picked the best of the worst, I begged the production people to save me from myself. Cut me out of the picture. Use photoshop to give me eyeballs and just one chin and a pair of discernible ears. Deface me with graffiti. But it was too tall an order when we were going to press in a matter of hours.
The next morning I dropped in to The Standard to pick up the papers for the curling club – a task I had promised my father I would do while he was away in Kauai – and laid eyes on the finished product. I had seen the photo in black on white the day before and was horrified. If possible, it was even worse in colour. I seriously considered blacking out my face before delivering the papers to my dad’s curling buddies.
You know how people try to console you when things have gone horribly wrong and you feel like you have no other recourse but to go into hiding for the rest of your life? They say things like, “It’s not that bad” and “It could be worse.” No one said anything like that. In the office, folks apologized. “Sorry about that picture.” At the nursing home my mom said, “That’s unfortunate.” My friend Deb, on the phone to my dismissive significant other, said, “No. Really. You don’t understand. It’s beyond ghastly.”
It’s not the first time I’ve been humiliated by a photo. A number of years ago, I saw a picture of a large woman’s backside. “Who is that?” I asked my mom. “That’s you,” she said. I immediately took up running and didn’t stop until I had shed 50 pounds.
On one rather infamous occasion, my exasperated (read: blind with fury) son Patrick had to take no less than a hundred head shots of me – thank the good lord for digital cameras – before he got one that we could send to my publisher.
So rare is it to get a pleasing image of me with my eyes open that when my mom and I come across one we chime together, “Coffin picture!”
I’m not photogenic. I’ve accepted that. It’s just that photos of me don’t usually wind up on the cover of a newspaper that is delivered to 11,000 mailboxes and is accessible to the world on the Internet, and it was this that put me in a bit of a pickle on Saturday night.
At a gig featuring an old musician friend of mine, I came across a bunch of guys I used to know in high school. When they found out I was writing for a living, they wanted to check me out on-line. Dilemma: Should I give them my business card or pretend to be so drunk that I couldn’t remember the name of the paper I work for let alone The Standard’s web address? In the end, I gave them my card but made them promise not to log on until Friday when there would be a new cover on the home page. Unfortunately, high school boys – even grown up ones – are cruel. I’m not sure whether it’s paranoia or arrogance but I can see them now, sitting at their computers and laughing their heads off, just like they did every June when the yearbook came out.
