[blparent] On independence

[Bridgit Pollpeter]

Steve,

I completely agree with you, and you said this much more eloquently than
I so briefly attempted too.

As a totally blind person who has graduated from university by not only
doing most of my own accommodations, but who never excepted a free pass
on assignments or a more "easy" exam because it was thought something
was too difficult for me, traveled to campus independently by public bus
and traversed campus itself on my own, shopped without assistance other
than to find products, navigated many a places without help including
stores, outdoor areas and hospitals, who lives alone with a blind
husband, and cooks, bakes, cleans and watches after their own children,
I also know we are human and will inevitably require help at times. This
help isn't always related to our blindness but just a sincere need for
extra hands. It's ludicrous to expect blind people to feel embarrassed
or ashamed to request for help or take help when offered when a true
need arises.

There is a fine line, and I whole-heartedly agree with your post, Steve,
but I also know we need to just be okay with the fact that assistance is
a part of life. All people should strive for their full potential,
disabled or not. We should encourage one another to reach this potential
and continue to challenge one another, and in the case of blind people,
this often becomes a matter of independence, and how we choose to live
our lives in terms of our blindness.

As a parent, we often will need or want some help. And at the end of the
day, we're exhausted, and a little assistance isn't a bad thing in my
opinion, grin. I think we need to explore our own independence and learn
to challenge ourselves as well as one another. We also need to determine
each individual situation and discover if complete independence is
necessary in that given situation or if we can let lose for a moment and
accept help. This is up to us to decide and no one else. At some point,
we need to be like everyone else

Sincerely,
Bridgit Kuenning-Pollpeter
Read my blog at:
http://blogs.livewellnebraska.com/author/bpollpeter/
 
"History is not what happened; history is what was written down."
The Expected One- Kathleen McGowan

Message: 5
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:18:50 -0500
From: "Steve Jacobson" <steve.jacobson at visi.com>
To: "Blind Parents Mailing List" <blparent at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [blparent] On independence
Message-ID: <auto-000008780234 at mailback3.g2host.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Bridgit,

I am a strong believer in our need to be as independent as we can be,
but I also think that independence has to be a personal thing because we
don't all 
have the same abilities.  However, there are things that we should ask
ourselves in my opinion as we evaluate our personal level of
independence.  None 
of my comments are meant to be directly addressed to you or Jo
Elizabeth, but only come as a general reaction to what has been said in
these notes.  Do 
we ask for help for something that we could learn to do but just
haven't?  Do we repeatedly ask for help for something we could be doing
but for which we 
didn't plan?  Do we make decisions assuming that we will get help
regardless of the impact our situation might have on others?  

One of my favorite speeches of Dr. Jernigan's was "The Nature of
Independence," because it approached independence from a very human
point of 
view.  However, some of the reactions to that speech over the years has
sometimes made me nervous because some have seen that speech as a 
release from trying to be independent.  If we ask ourselves questions
like the above and answer as honestly as we can, We will each be as
independent 
as we can be given our respective abilities.  The question isn't whether
each of us is as independent as every other of us, the question is
whether we've 
moved as far as we can along the road to independence.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson