The thing with laundry

When it comes to doing laundry, I have to get a little bit creative. Before I moved away from home my parents had always helped with it so it was a shock to the system when I had to do it for myself and I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d cope with it.

While I was at university I had help from an outside supportive living agency who would also assist me with my laundry, cooking, cleaning and shopping whenever I needed it so I know that it’s not something I’d ever have to  worry about too much if I ever did decide to live alone. Yet I hate to be defeated by anything (except my shoe laces – I gave up trying to tie those a long time ago) so I made the effort to find ways around washing my own clothes. I knew that I could always ask for help if it got too hard, but I wanted to be ready just in case there was ever a time I don’t have a choice, and so that I know I can do as much for myself as is physically possible.

Luckily I’d always managed to find somewhere to live where my bedroom had been on the ground floor so I didn’t have to fret about trying to get all my clothes downstairs to the washing machine because there was no way that I would have tried to carry the basket myself. Eventually I did manage to find a way around this problem though for if I ever want to give mum a hand at home where my bedroom is on the first floor and the washing machine isn’t. I have to get some plastic carrier bags (like the kind you get from the supermarket), fill them with whatever I’m planning on throwing in the washer, loop them around my wrist and go downstairs holding on to my handrails as normal. It usually takes three or four trips for me to gather a full load, but I get there in the end.

When my room was on the same floor as the kitchen at university I usually opted to do what I like to call the ‘crawl and push manoeuvre ‘ where I would get down on my knees on the floor and push whatever I had my clothes in along with me until I got them to where they needed to be. This took a while too but it was better than the alternative if I tried to carry it. When I would try to do this I would usually end up falling over (what a surprise) or I’d spill all my clothes all over the living room floor, neither of which are very good, especially not if the people you live with are around at the time and just so happen to see your unmentionables go flying across the room. My housemates were always really helpful and would help me if they were around though.

The difficulties don’t stop there. If for whatever reason I can’t use a dyer or my clothes need to be hung up on an airier before I can put them back in the wardrobe,  that takes me a fair amount of time too. I have to hold on to the airier for support while I put things onto it, which means that things often fall off again as fast as I can hang them there, so it takes ages (and a lot of mumbling to myself most of the time) to get everything to stay in place. The constant bending down to pick things up makes me quite tired too so I have to take a lot rest breaks too.

I used to use Betsy for extra drying space too if I wasn’t planning on going out anywhere. I haven’t had to do this with Martha yet, but I’m sure her time will come.

Why I prefer reading to sports

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I prefer reading to sports. I don’t know the offside rule, have no idea what the difference is between Rugby League and Rugby Union, and, even though my dad likes watching Wimbledon every year, I don’t know the first thing about tennis. This isn’t because I couldn’t play sport because of my Cerebral Palsy, it’s because I’ve yet to find something I enjoy so much that I’d choose doing that over spending my Sunday afternoons curled up with a Val McDermid novel and a cup of tea.

My parents always made sure that I knew the world of sport was open to me if I wanted it to be. My dad even sat me down and made me watch the athletics at the 1996 Paralympics on the TV when I was just five years old to show me what I could achieve if I wanted. “I’m not saying you have to do it” he said “I just want you to know that you could”.

Over the years I have tried to get on with many sports, and well, it just hasn’t happened. I decided that I hated football on the day I tried to join in with my friends and ended up tripping over the ball and falling flat on my face. Then, there was the time I tried to serve a ball in a game of tennis and fell over with the effort, and, as I’ve said before I can’t run.

Despite that, I do quite enjoy the odd game of cricket that my family used to play on holiday. I just sit in my wheelchair (it’s safer that way, trust me) and whack the ball as hard as I can to score as many runs as possible without moving until someone catches me out. It’s not the conventional way of playing but it’s my way nonetheless and I quite like that.

People often ask me if I’ve ever taken part in wheelchair basketball and the answer is no, I haven’t. The idea just doesn’t interest me (and I’m terrified of being hit in the face with the ball, truth be told) but I’d happily try any sport that caught my eye at least once. The hard part isn’t me trying something out, it’s selling the idea to me in a way that gets my attention in the first place that’s possibly the most difficult bit.

I do enjoy exercise; I just prefer the things that you don’t do in a team, so the only person I have to push and compete with is myself. I loved using the gym in high school and at university, I love going out for walks with Martha, and I can always be found on the dance floor at parties in my walking frame or wheelchair moving along to the music in any way I can. I even quite enjoy swimming even though I’m not very good. That, and I like being able to jump around in the water in a way that I can’t on land.

In the end though, I much prefer to leap into the world of a good book. I love being nosey at the other world’s that writers have created in their own head, I enjoy reading stories that I can relate to, be they fiction or none fiction, and I truly admire the way that a writer can make you feel so much emotion without ever having met you. For me, it’s hard for me to imagine loving any sport over the magic of a book, Cerebral Palsy or no Cerebral Palsy.

Lessons from my childhood

I only ever remember wishing that I didn’t have Cerebral Palsy once, and I was about five at the time.

It was summer and I was playing outside in the sunshine. At the time I was an only child because my sister hadn’t been born yet, so I’d become very good at using my imagination to make up my own games. That day I decided that I was going to practice running, not for any particular reason, I just felt like it.

I did a couple of laps going from the front garden to the one at the back of the house. I knew that I wasn’t technically doing it right, but I didn’t care. I was moving faster than I did when I walked and I wasn’t falling over. It felt good, and that was enough for me.

After a couple of laps I was starting to feel really proud of myself, it didn’t last long. As I came out of back garden round into the front again, there was another child who wasn’t from my street watching me over the fence. I didn’t know their name and I don’t think they knew mine.

“Ha, ha. You can’t run” the kid chanted, before galloping up and down the pavement to show me what I should have been doing it. I was heartbroken. She was right and I knew it. I’d known that I hadn’t been doing the same as the other child, but I’d been pretending that I was. I felt stupid and pathetic. My illusion had been shattered. I burst into tears and wondered back inside to find my mummy.

When I did I wailed to her about what had happened and declared that I wished I had normal legs like everyone else. My mum just stared at me and told to “never, ever say anything like that again,

“And anyway”, she carried on “you can run in your own little fashion, can’t you?”

For the second time that day I was left feeling deeply ashamed of myself, not because I couldn’t do something, but because I knew that I’d been ungrateful for everything that I could do that so many other people with Cerebral Palsy can’t. That day, I promised myself that I would never wish my disability away again, and I haven’t. Sure, there were other times in my childhood I got upset at not being able to dance like my friends could and stuff, but I think that’s probably quite normal for any kid sometimes, disabled or not. I spent the rest of my childhood telling people that I was proud to have a disability because it meant that someone else in the world didn’t have to. Now that I’m older I know that might not necessarily be the way things work, but it was how I liked to think of things at the time.

Despite my difficulties I still took part in all my primary school sports days on my walking frame alongside everyone else and managed to think about how I usually always came in last because it didn’t matter anymore. I decided not to take up running in the end, not because I couldn’t, but because I realised that I’d much rather bury my head in a book.

So far I’ve stayed true to my word. Yes, I have CP, that will never change, nor do I want it to. More on that later.

Cooking with Cerebral Palsy

Here’s a question for you: why aren’t there more disabled chefs on Television in the UK?

These days I’m starting to feel like I can’t flip on the TV set without someone taunting me with images of delicious meals that they’ve just made themselves, quite often from scratch. I stare longingly at them all for about three seconds with mouth watering and then have to change the channel, and not just because in those few seconds I’ve become so hungry that I want to devour everything in my food cupboard. I switch over to something else because I know that there’s a good chance I won’t be able to make that meal for myself, not necessarily because I can’t cook (in truth I’m hopeless, but that’s beside the point)  I know that I can’t cook in the way that others who don’t have my physical difficulties can.

When I step into a kitchen people have to worry about more than me giving them food poisoning. I can’t lift pans full of ingredients, so cooking on a hob is a no-go, I can’t balance well enough to get heavy or big things in and out of the oven without burning myself or dropping it on my foot, and even things like chopping and peeling potatoes are a major struggle. So yes, sometimes when I see cookery programmes  where the host is casually zipping around the kitchen carrying oven trays and slicing onions at eye-watering speed (no pun intended) like it’s the most natural thing in the world, I get a little frustrated with myself.

Slowly I’ve been working out as many ways around it as a possibly I can. One of my most valuable life lessons I think I learned over my time as a student is that you can cook pasta in a microwave if you put it in a suitable container and pour boiling water from the kettle over it (in your face, saucepans!). If I’m in charge of making my own dinner I’ll use Quorn instead of meat because that too can be done in the good ol’ microwave or I eat a lot of soup because, yup, you guessed it, that goes in there too.

I know that there must be a lot of disabled chefs out there and I’d personally love it if they were given more air time so that I could learn their tips and tricks. I know that a group of disabled chefs recently made it to the final of ITV show Food, Glorious Food. While researching for the post today I came across Michael Caines, an award-winning chef who also happens to be an amputee and has featured on the Good Food Channel before. I just hope personally that one day there are a lot more cooks on our screens with difficulties simliar to mine who cook their pasta in a plastic mesuring jug and do lots of other interesting stuff I haven’t thought of yet.

If you have any hints to share that you think would come in handy, please leave them in the comments box below.

Birthday Surprises

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Dad and I

At the risk of sounding like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, I like trains. In fact I like them an awful lot, but probably not for the same reasons he does. Unlike Sheldon (played by Jim Parsons) I can’t name them model, and if there is a way to get somewhere that is much faster I’ll choose that option rather than make my friends add hours to their journey just so I can ride on a choo-choo, but they are one of my more favoured modes of public transport.

For a long time I was just as afraid of them as I am of the bus. I’d heard all sorts of horror stories from people about them being left on board and ending up in all sorts of places they’d never intended to be, but given that I knew you could book ramp assistance and seats to help with disabled access I knew it was one thing that I would have to conquer in the end. I started out small at first when I found myself an internship at a company that was based a half-an-hour ride away from my home. Mum came with me the first day to make sure that everything went smoothly – and it did- so for the rest of the time I was on my own. Although this short journey was a massive victory for me, the real turning point came for me a few months later when I decided to travel back home from university by myself to surprise my dad for his birthday.

This was an even bigger challenge than the one I had faced getting to my placement and back. I had chosen to go to a university that was about 70 miles away from where I lived and would take me two trains – yes two – to get there. I’d had the idea for weeks, as soon as I realised that I had the afternoon of his special day – a Tuesday- off and I didn’t have another lecture until Thursday afternoon, but it took me about a week to pluck up the courage to book the tickets. I paid for them instantly and made arrangements for assisted travel before I could change my mind.  I hardly slept the night before with nerves. I’d never got more than one train per trip before and all I could think about was all the things that could go wrong. Every time I had a thought like that I tried to push it away and think only of how it would all be worth it to see the look on Dad’s face. This wasn’t about me, it was about him.

Thankfully on the day things all went according to plan. Members of station staff even walked me from one platform to another which was more than I had been expecting (in a good way) and when I saw my mum and her new partner waiting for me as I got off the last train so that she could take me to my Dad’s flat I thought that I might fall to my knees in relief.

When the three of us wondered into his kitchen together he just looked between us all and saw that my Mum and her partner were both in their work uniforms. For a second he looked confused and then he realised what I had done to get there,  smiled and looked as if he were about to cry.

I learned an important life lesson that day, two actually. I learned that I could manage the train by myself (with a little help, but there’s no shame in that) and I learned that it is important to push ourselves sometimes, if not for ourselves but for the sake of those around us.

That was almost two years ago now. It is my Dad’s birthday again on Friday and I really have no idea what to get him this year. I’m not sure if I can ever top my surprise, but I’m always willing to try.