What Is This Can’t?

What Is This Can’t?

It’s late as I write this and I should be getting ready for bed. Instead, I feel like it’s important for me to get this down on paper first. Otherwise, it will be gone by morning, never to be reclaimed by me.

One of the main things I remember from my childhood is I was never told I couldn’t do something. Several examples of this come to mind.

I don’t know how old I was. My mom and I waited in the exam room to see Dr. Balliett, an ophthalmologist at Dean A. McGee Eye Institute in Oklahoma City. I had a support wrap on my wrist. When the doctor came in, he noticed it.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“She was riding her bike and had a wreck,” Mom explained.

He looked from her to me. “She can’t ride a bike. She doesn’t see well enough.”

“Yes, I can,” I said. “And I can rollerskate too.”

Several years before this, in one of our first visits with Dr. Balliett, he explained to Mom what he wanted to do. He wanted to give me some glasses with little binoculars so I “might” be able to learn to read.

“But she can already read,” Mom said. “She’s one of the best readers in her class.”

I don’t think he quite believed her.

They gave me something to read for him and I did.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, I switched schools because we moved. In the gym class there was a low balance bean. I wanted to walk on it. At a parent-teacher meeting, I did. Mom walked on one side of me in case I needed her. The teacher walked on the other.

To be honest, I have no idea if this really happened like that, but it’s how I remember it. It’s possible it was part of some physical therapy I did through Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City. It’s also quite possible that as I walked on the low beam, I held on to their hands.

There is a “can’t” that I believed. This one came from an outside source, not my parents. I was in 7th grade and enrolled in an art class as an elective in school. I remember the year going well. We sketched portraits of our classmates, learned calligraphy, and worked with watercolors.

In a lesson on contouring and shadowing, my assignment was to draw the rubber tree plant by the teacher’s office and near two large windows that let in a lot of natural light. I worked hard on that drawing. I felt proud of myself when I turned it in. By contrast, I felt crushed lower than the gravel parking lot outside the art building when I got it back.

The teacher had written in red on my precious drawing. “The shadowing on this is all over the place. You’ll never be any kind of an artist.”

What I took from that was, “You can’t draw.” And I believed it. She was, after all, an artist of some note in the area. She knew what she was talking about. Right?

I thought so.

There is one more “can’t” that is an integral part of my daily life no matter what I do and regardless of whether or not I like it.

I can’t drive.

Currently, under state law, your eyesight can’t be worse than 20/50 with correction to drive.

Mine is 20/70. In my left eye. I have light perception only in the right.

As much as I would like to, it’s not safe for me to drive. You can imagine what that was like as a 16-year-old when all of my friends were getting their permits and licenses, though.

In spite of that, I try to live my life as “What is this ‘can’t’ anyway?”

I’m the only one who gets to decide that.