Can I say this? I hate the fact that I have to pay for people to be with Nat. Pay someone to live with him, pay someone to work next to him at the supermarket.<\/p>\n
Can I also say this? I am so lucky that I can pay for people to be with Nat and that there are good people for this.<\/p>\n
But, this whole thing makes me very sad. I think about when I was in therapy, and how it stung that I was not actually friends with my therapist, I was basically a customer. A client. She loved me, I’m sure. But she was working when she was talking to me. She had a life that I was not allowed into. There was an utter imbalance, where she knew all about me, and I knew almost nothing about her. When I would run into her in a store, it was so weird! There she was, herself, an older woman with a handbag buying stuff! It made me feel almost sorry for her. Or embarrassed? Why? The mask of the professional her was off at that moment and there was just the skin of her face hovering vulnerably in space.<\/p>\n
So what is it like for Nat? The age old question: how much does he know about his life? And whatever he does know, how much of it bothers him?<\/p>\n
Here goes, the horrible question: Do people with disabilities sometimes feel inferior because of what they cannot do, because they must depend on others?<\/em> Oh, how Ableist of me to ask that, but I want to know, I want to hear about it.<\/p>\n Or is it just like it is for me, where you do come to accept that there are services you require that you must pay for. Like seeing my doctor. Hiring a plumber. I can feel stupid and incompetent if I need someone to look at a hurt knee and tell me why it hurts, but I don’t. We accept that there are professionals in our lives to do for us what we cannot.<\/p>\n So — is that the reality Nat knows?<\/p>\n Or does he wish that instead of a paid live-in caregiver, he had just a roommate, a friend?<\/p>\n It is so painful but I have to ask. And of course there are no answers. Of course. That is the real problem of loving someone who has a profound disability. There is indeed mystery and you are constantly reminded of how terribly human (flawed, limited) you<\/em> are that you cannot give this beautiful person exactly the life he should<\/em> have.<\/p>\n “Should?” What is the truth here?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can I say this? I hate the fact that I have to pay for people to be with Nat. Pay someone to live with him, pay someone to work next to him at the supermarket. Can I also say this? I am so lucky that I can pay for people to be with Nat and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-13a","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4040"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4042,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions\/4042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}