I WAS A YOUNG MOTHER
                        BEING STIFLED BY BLINDNESS 
                            by Barbara Pierce 

From the Editor: Readers of Good Housekeeping magazine 
will remember the feature "My Problem." Women across the country 
are invited to submit manuscripts about personal problems which they 
have solved. Barbara Pierce (Associate Editor of the Braille Monitor, 
as well as President of the National Federation of the Blind of 
Ohio and Chair of the Federation's Public Relations Committee) tried 
her hand at this task, thinking that it would be great publicity for 
the Federation if she could get a story published.

Unfortunately, Good Housekeeping editors seem to have seen 
through her plan and rejected the piece. We thought that it was interesting
and that Monitor readers would agree with us. The article is 
reprinted from the Spring, 1990, Buckeye Bulletin, the publication 
of the National Federation of the Blind of Ohio. Here it is: 
 
In 1973 I was twenty-eight years old and a faculty wife living in 
a small mid-west town with my loving husband and three small children. 
Said like that, it sounds idyllic, and that was the portrait I clung 
to, avoiding any thought of the future and refusing to deal with the 
growing dissatisfactions of the present.  

The main complication in my life was my blindness. My vision had
deteriorated since childhood, and even though I had been introduced to
Braille and the white cane as a teenager, I could still use my vision for 
some things, so I told myself I was not really blind. Since college, 
though, I had had to admit that my eyes now provided me with almost 
no useful information except which lights were on.  

Despite the profound handicap of vision loss, I grew up in a happy 
family with a younger brother who was understanding of the extra time 
my parents spent working with me. They were truly amazing people. 
Dad was easy-going and positive. Lots of homework? No problem; we'd 
dig our way through it--no regret at sacrificing his quiet evening. 
As an engineer he had no difficulty with the science and math, but 
German and diagramming sentences presented challenges to us both. 
 
In the fifties there was little academic support for families whose 
blind children attended public schools. We were on our own to devise 
alternative methods of doing my work. So I diagrammed sentences in 
the air for Dad to transcribe onto paper and learned to do complex 
algebra in my head.  

My mother was far more distressed about my blindness. Being a mother, 
she worried. Having an active conscience, she wondered if she were 
somehow responsible for my condition. I was dimly aware of her pain, 
but she never let it stand in the way of my growing up. I went camping 
with the Girl Scouts, learned to cook and iron, and did my share of 
household chores. She never communicated her anxiety about my safety. 
She taught me about colors, make-up, and doing my hair. She saw to 
it that I learned to dress appropriately even though I couldn't tell 
what other people were wearing, and she suffered with me when the 
boys I liked ignored me or treated me like a sister. My senior year 
she first rejoiced with me and then began worrying again when I fell 
in love. 

Thanks to my parents' support, I graduated second in my suburban high 
school class. I entered Oberlin College the following September and 
for the first time in my life had to face the prospect of getting 
my work done without a full-time reader/secretary at my disposal. 
I learned quickly about hiring and supervising readers, and I worked 
hard. But I played hard too, taking part in college organizations 
and dating, though my heart was still entangled with my high school 
flame, attending a college far away.  

The college campus was small and easy to memorize. I used a folding 
cane that I could make vanish whenever someone presented her (or
preferably) himself to walk with me to my destination. I wouldn't allow
friends to go out of their way for me, so I often didn't do social things 
or run errands I would have wanted to because I couldn't find anyone 
who was going that direction.  

All that changed my senior year when I began to date my Milton professor. 
It was one of those whirlwind romances that are the talk of small, 
close-knit communities. I graduated from Oberlin with high honors 
in June and became a faculty wife that September. I felt like a fairy-tale 
princess.  By 1973 Bob and I had bought a thirteen-room house that had
originally been a dormitory. It was close enough to campus for him to walk
to his office and for me to walk downtown and to the pediatrician, where 
I was going frequently by this time because we had three children: 
Steven, five; Anne, two; and Margaret, born two months prematurely 
that August. I taught Lamaze pre-natal classes one evening a week 
and pretended that my life was satisfying.  

The things I was doing I could do well. My children were happy, my 
home was as orderly as any with three small children, my husband's 
classes met often in our living room and ate home-baked cookies, and 
my students thought I was a good childbirth teacher. But I was beginning 
to experience the nagging worries and dissatisfactions of many young 
mothers in the seventies. Conversing with young children was not
intellectually challenging. Collecting new recipes from the recorded
edition of Good Housekeeping was fun, but how many chicken casseroles does
one woman need? I wanted an identity of my own--not as someone's wife 
or mother, but as myself.  

None of this was unusual, but my options seemed much more restricted 
than those facing most women. I could not drive. I could not read 
print. I couldn't even read Braille very well because no one had ever 
encouraged me to work on building my reading speed when I was young. 
I hated my cane and used it as little as possible. It seemed to shriek 
to people of my blindness, and everyone knew that blind people couldn't 
do much. They made brooms in sheltered workshops or tuned pianos. 
They stood on street corners and sold pencils or, if they were musical, 
played the accordion. I was not like that. But what was I like?  What 
could I do with myself?  It was a question that I could put off a 
little longer because the children were still small enough for me 
to pretend that I didn't yet want to go back to work. 

Never during my struggles did I consider that other blind people might 
be able to help me. Everyone had always told me that I was not like 
other blind people. Since I had never known a blind person,  I assumed 
that my friends and family were right. I told myself that I was really 
a sighted person who couldn't see. I was normal, and nothing that 
blind people could say would have much relevance to me because, even 
though my world was limited to the distance I could walk and the
information I could glean from my recorded books and what my dear husband
had time to read to me, I was not a shuffling, passive, doggedly cheerful 
blind puppet to be dragged around and handed whatever other people 
no longer wanted.  

Then, in January of 1974, someone brought me a stack of recordings 
produced by the National Federation of the Blind. He said I might 
be interested in listening to them. I smiled politely and put them 
aside with no intention of wasting my time on such twaddle. But very 
soon thereafter my husband had to be away for a weekend, and the baby 
came down with her first cold. To complete my misery, I had read and 
returned every one of the recorded books lent to me by the National 
Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. I faced 
the prospect of two days of walking a fussy baby and talking to two 
toddlers while having nothing to read. I remembered the stack of records 
and decided that they were better than nothing.  

When Bob came home Sunday afternoon, expecting to find a frantic, 
ill-tempered wife, he found instead a woman who had been transformed. 
Poor man, he had to listen to the pent-up flood of discoveries that 
I had made. He is patient, and he paid close attention as I explained 
that I had discovered fifty thousand people who believed that blindness 
didn't have to consign one to poverty and helplessness. I had learned 
that as a member of the general public, I had been brainwashed like 
everyone else about blindness. I realized that my dislike of my cane 
was really rejection and denial of blindness. I had been working hard 
at doing things as well as sighted people not because blindness need 
not be more than a nuisance in my life, but because I didn't want 
anyone to think of me as blind. Dimly I had begun to understand that 
if I were ever to step beyond the confines of my current narrow life, 
it would be because I had come to terms with myself as I was--a 
blind woman with energy and dreams and the capacity to fulfill them. 
 
No profound insight can remake a person overnight, but it is accurate 
to say that from then on I was a different person. I organized a local 
chapter of the Federation in my county. As I did so, I discovered 
that I could help other blind people who hadn't yet learned even the 
little I knew about coming to accept themselves and being proud of 
who they were. I also discovered just how many blind people had suffered 
real discrimination at society's hands.  

I learned that I have been incredibly lucky. No one had tried to take 
my children away from me because I was a blind parent. This still 
happens to blind parents today despite the overwhelming evidence that 
blindness does not prevent a person from being a good parent. Each 
time I have looked for a job, I have found one. I learned that blind 
people face a 70% unemployment rate--not because only 30% of us 
are capable of holding down good jobs, but because employers don't 
believe that we can.  

As I became active in the National Federation of the Blind, I met 
blind people who simply did not recognize the boundaries I had always 
lived with. They traveled all over the country and the world independently,
getting to their departure, retrieving their luggage, and coping with 
ground transportation without thinking twice about the task. I discovered 
that I could do these things as well, and I cannot express the sensation 
of freedom I had packing for a plane trip and feeling no anxiety about 
the logistics of getting where I needed to go.  I discovered blind people
who read Braille at 400 words a minute. Though I had been cheated as a
child by not being forced to master the Braille code thoroughly, I could
begin as an adult to rectify the situation.  The Federation also gave me
personal fulfillment and a circle of wonderful friends who knew and loved
me for who I was. They were interested in my husband and children, but they
did not define me by those relationships. 

I had work to do and battles for equality to win. I learned new skills--
writing, giving interviews to the press, teaching other Federationists how 
to do the public education that is so important if the blind are ever 
to take our rightful place in society. As a result of these new skills 
and the self-confidence I have learned from the NFB, I applied for 
a job as a college administrator at Oberlin and got it. There I had 
a chance to educate many people about the abilities of the blind. 
I also had plenty of opportunities to learn to juggle husband, children, 
home, full-time job, and volunteer work.  

I have moved on now to magazine editing. My children are almost grown, 
and my new job requires that I travel frequently. I can hardly remember 
the days when airports made my stomach turn inside out. Blindness 
is one of the characteristics that define me. It means that I can't 
drive a car or read print. It also means that I am organized and have 
a well-trained mind--two characteristics that most of my friends 
would give a great deal to possess. I still have room to grow. None 
of us has ever become all that we can. I frequently discover little 
pockets of cowardice and insecurity in myself, but by and large, I 
am free thanks to the National Federation of the Blind.