When my son started kindergarten, I was still learning how to be blind myself.
Fortunately, his teacher had previously taught my daughter. She knew who I was before my accident. She knew how involved I had always been in my children’s school, and instead of assuming I couldn’t participate anymore, she invited me in.
That invitation meant more than she probably realized.
I went into Blake’s kindergarten class to talk about the blind community. As the years went on, I had the opportunity to do it again in his Grade 3 class, and I also visited Taya’s classes in Grades 3 and 5.
Looking back now, those early presentations were probably not even a quarter of what we teach students today. I was still figuring it all out myself.
But I knew one thing.
I wanted my children’s classmates to understand what their lives at home looked like.
I wanted them to understand blindness, ask questions and learn how to interact respectfully with someone who couldn’t see.
I shared some of the misconceptions I had believed myself before becoming blind.
For example, if I had seen someone with a white cane before my accident, I probably would have thought the polite thing to do was become quiet, tiptoe around them and give them lots of space.
Now I understood how unsettling that could actually be.
I can’t see you approaching me.
Simply saying hello or letting me know you’re nearby can prevent me from being startled and makes it much easier for me to understand what’s happening around me.
The kids loved learning about all the little adaptations I was discovering.
I showed them how I could identify different denominations of money using tactile features. They thought my PenFriend was incredibly cool because I could use recorded labels to identify my clothing.
And I explained why I learned to tie my shoes together when I took them off.
Let’s just say you only have to leave the house wearing mismatched shoes once before developing a system.
But my favourite part was letting the kids ask questions.
Kids are curious. When they’re given permission to ask respectful questions about disability, something wonderful happens.
Disability stops being something strange that they’re supposed to avoid talking about.
It becomes something they can understand.
There was another reason those classroom visits mattered so much to me.
My children had been through a lot.
They were still little kids, but suddenly they had responsibilities other children their age might not have. There were things Mom couldn’t see or smell anymore, and sometimes they had to compensate for that.
That has always been difficult for me to accept.
I never wanted my disability to make my children grow up faster.
For a long time, I carried enormous guilt about not being the mother I had been before my accident.
But guilt can create its own barriers.
The more I held onto the belief that I wasn’t the parent I used to be, the harder it became to recognize the parent I still was.
I couldn’t change what had happened to our family.
I could change how we talked about it.
Walking into those classrooms helped take some of the weight off my children’s shoulders. Their friends could understand a little more about their lives at home instead of my kids having to explain everything themselves.
And something else happened that I couldn’t have known at the time.
I discovered how much I loved talking to children about disability.
Each time I returned to another classroom, I was learning too. I became more comfortable talking about blindness, more confident answering questions and more aware of just how powerful these conversations could be.
I saw what happened when we gave kids information instead of allowing uncertainty or assumptions to fill the gaps.
At the time, I thought I was simply helping my children and their classmates understand our new life.
I had no idea those little classroom conversations were planting the seeds for something much bigger.
