Closing my Eyes to Hide
This prose poem is the cri de coeur of a woman living at the intersection, pilloried between single motherhood and chronic illness. A snapshot of an invisible life that aims to give voice to the intricate daily struggles faced by disabled mothers - unseen, unheard, unable to access the economic and cultural capital that will get 'our issues' onto the wider feminist agenda. It is time to hear the voices of disabled women. It is time for those voices to be prioritised and amplified within Radical Feminism.
By Sal Vattic
“I deliberate over whether to take my stick out, acting as it does to highlight my frailty in a world where even the strongest of women are at risk.”
'Hold' by Sal Vattic
It isn’t invisible to me. I see it in the gnarled, swollen joints of my hands; I feel it every morning as I wake to my eight-year long bed-fellow, Pain; I count it in all the days of their childhood lost to fatigue, as they played in the sun and I lay in my bed; as they watched 8 hours of Netflix, and I lay in my bed; as they got their own breakfast, as quiet as mice, so as not to wake me. Or didn’t get their own breakfast, too taken in by the hypnotic flicker of cartoons and I woke to find them undressed and hungry, with 10 minutes before the school bell rang. It is in all the art I can’t make, the Phd I couldn’t start, the career I will never have, the poverty I will always live in.
It is my constant companion, irritatingly persistent, whether tip-tapping on my shoulder like a child nagging for sweets or screaming through every part of me, an insatiable banshee, intent on consuming every ounce of my energy.
No my disability isn’t invisible to me, but I know it is to you.
Partly it is so because I make it so - the tiny bit of power I retain, a pantomime conjurer disappearing a coin behind your ear, knowing we are both more content to ignore the sham.
In the street I am careful to walk as straight and strong as possible, not wishing to highlight my vulnerability for fear of attack. Or else from surfeit of the questioning, pitying reactions as I hobble by, elicited because ‘someone of my age’ shouldn’t be Arthritic. I deliberate over whether to take my stick out, acting as it does to highlight my frailty in a world where even the strongest of women are at risk; considering that conversely it could serve as a decent weapon. Sometimes I leave it at home simply out of shame. The mobility scooter sits rusting in my front yard, run aground by this same churning sea of embarrassment and fear.
When I meet with friends or acquaintances, I take pains to be as sunny-funny-carefree me as I can muster, just to savour a taste of ‘who I used to be Before’. And because you are likely to be my only adult contact all day/week/month, I don’t want to waste time discussing the misery and pain that will fill the rest of my day/week/month. This is why I didn’t ‘seem disabled’ when I danced at that party or socialised in the pub, but let me assure you, I made up for it in the fortnight that followed, my cloak of invisibility restored as you all went back to the world and I lay bed-ridden, living-in-my-head-ridden.
It is not that I am in want of supportive friends - I have a clan of women who wash my pots, tidy my house, look after my kids, and yes listen to me moan and cry and moan some more. Mostly they are other disabled women and single mothers - an invisible insight of the invisible class, that we are the ones with the least resources to spare, resourcefully sparing each others’ pain. They see me through the darkest times, the most desperate, when I am able to over-ride my pride and ask for help.
But there is no-one to see me through the rest of times, the long in-betweens when I am simply stuck. Stuck in a house I can not clean; stuck mothering children I don’t have the resources for; stuck with the knowledge that this is for the rest of time and all those things I hoped I’d achieve are as lost to me as the memory of having hands that worked properly. It is not a narrative that anyone wishes to hear, being comprised of inaction and derived from a void; a story impossible to tell, being concerned as it is with the silent and the unseen. And so having no telling in me, I will leave you here, as a child closing her eyes to hide, certain that I am disappeared, visible to all who wish to find me.