Kristen Witucki

Visions: a Tale from the Ultrasound Room

Kristen Witucki — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:25:27 +0000

Happy new year! My first entry of the year is a publication over at the Momoir blog:

http://www.themomoirproject.com/momoir-blog/visions-a-tale-from-the-ultrasound-room/

Ninety-Four Ways of Saying Thank you!

Kristen Witucki — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 04:37:52 +0000

I forgot to post this–ok, I forgot to post for a while, but I’ll try to make amends in 2012. But I am number 3! Happy reading!
http://therumpus.net/2011/11/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-90-94-ways-of-saying-thank-you/?full=yes

Dreamland Calls Me

Kristen Witucki — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:18:30 +0000

The first time you decided not to fall asleep during our bedtime routine was, in a way, not the first time. For the first few months of your life, I struggled mightily to coax you into indulging in more than a cat nap. But I knew that those earliest months, you were learning the rhythms, you were hungry or cold or startled, and you were getting used to the world outside the cocoon of my body. But your father could, so it seemed to me, always entice you to slumber. You remained a catnapper during the days, but once you grew a little, you succumbed to my bedtime rituals—reading a story, playing with the book, and lying against me on the bed to listen to a song–as if I were a hypnotist. I would sing “The Water Is Wide,” “Kumbaya,” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and the tide of your breathing would become deep and steady by the time I sang about possible unrequited love. Then I’d pick you up and carry you to your crib.
Oh yes, and I did hear Samuel Jackson’s magical voice reading Adam Mansbach’s book, Go the Fuck to Sleep, after I read about the hyp which surrounded its release, and while I found the book to be humorous, I felt the fortune of, somehow, having escaped from the kid who decides not to go to sleep.
Until the day you decided.
I don’t remember the date of your first decision to stay awake, but it was shortly before your ten-month birthday and right around the time your daycare director began, with our blessing, your transition to the toddler room. You’re still half in the infant room and half in the toddler room. In the infant room, you nap and hang out with seven girls. In the toddler room, you visit Circle Time and playtime and occasionally hang out on a mat during naptime.
And now at home, ever since that day, you refuse to buy into my bedtime routine. I read you books, and you listen, you play with them happily, but when we lie down together, you no longer want to hear about love in all its musical forms. Instead you roll onto your stomach, pop your head up as if from a jack-in-the-box, then sit up and start singing to me, “Baba dada” and blowing raspberries as you crawl obliviously toward the edge of the bed before you wail that I’ve interrupted your exploration.
“He won’t go to sleep, and it’s bedtime,” I yell to your father over your chatter and protests.
“Oh he never settles right down. He kicks his feet and moves around a little bit. You just have to keep him lying down.” “What if he rolls over and sits up?”
“Well,” your dad pauses. “I don’t know. But if he’s not tired, let him play.”
Your father, unencumbered by parental research, indulges you in routinelessness. However, I’ve read the same advice in all the parenting books and on all the websites: stick to a good bedtime routine, keep it short and simple, make sure you slow down the activity, if you stick to a routine, you will send the signal that it’s time for bed. But you, Langston—or maybe the experts–are sending me the signal that you can break that routine, and I’ve therefore failed as a parent. Already.
So I pull out the last stop, the one thing your father can’t offer, the breast, and you settle down to suck, and then you either drift away or give a cry or two when the milk is gone before you heed the call of dreamland.
Maybe this is just the new routine. As you gain the mobility to widen your world, the nourishment from my body comforts you and reconnects us, preparing you for slumber.

Oh the places you’ll go!

Kristen Witucki — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:07:13 +0000

When all else fails, quote Dr. Seuss.
This is going to be a too-brief post, but I have to say that going places is my theme this week. Langston is transitioning to the toddler room at his daycare, Yellow Brick Road Infant and Toddler Center in Highland Park. The people are really being very understanding with this transition. Sometimes he plays with the toddlers and sometimes with the babies. Sometimes, he naps with the babies, and twice this week, he napped on a mat with the toddlers. This way, he gets to meet everybody, plus his own needs. I love that! But after some initial misgivings (and parental sadness about a stage beginning to draw to a close), I realized that this transition to the toddler room couldn’t come at a more perfect time, because Langston now crawls with a destination in mind. (I just had to stop writing, because he fell on his bottom, which normally doesn’t phase him except when he’s tired, and this time he was tired, so I nursed him into what I hope is more than a cat nap). Anyway, Langston now has places to go: the dining room table, the recliner, the piano. I’ve tried to turn him around to head back toward the couch which is his safe zone, and he turns around again! The nerve! So when he gets too close to something I don’t want him to interact with/knock on top of himself, I take him back to the couch, so he can crawl over again. It’s tiring, and this is only day 2! I can see why mothers who never get babysitters for their babies might want to once in a while for their toddlers! But this stage is exciting, too. I’m thrilled that Langston stands holding onto things and makes more sounds. I’m excited about when he really starts walking and talking, even though those milestones present their own challenges.
Going places applies to my life this week, too, because this is the first time total strangers have commented on my blog. (I’m pretty sure they’re not just really clever spammers). I feel the urge, not only to thank them, but to follow up with a post which is extra well-written/poetic, which I’m just too tired to create right now. So I’ve decided that it’s better to write matter-of-factly than not to write at all. Not writing at all can lead me very quickly and easily into writing paralysis, which is a state when my critic runs amuck in my brain and keeps me from putting words down at all.
And on that note, due to the confidence boost I got from this blog, I’m going to do something which has been scaring me for weeks now, which I should have done a couple weeks ago and didn’t. That’s all I can say publicly, and please don’t ask me privately what I’m talking about. Just wish me luck.

Just Like a Big Boy

Kristen Witucki — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:46:58 +0000

As you practice crawling and walking, all in the spirit of play,
oblivious that I track your development through each interaction, I
often say, “Oh you sat up (as opposed to just sitting) just like a big
boy!” “You’re standing up just like a big boy!” Earlier, it was,
“You’re holding your head up just like a big boy!” “You’re sitting
(not sitting up yet) just like a big boy!” It’s an expression I have
used without a lot of forethought, which possibly means that I adopted
it from my mother. Now that I’m a mother myself, though still a new
one, I’ve often heard my mother’s expressions come out of my mouth
without effort.
So here’s the big question. When do you stop being “just like” a
big boy and actually become one?
Of course, the answer changes. While time can’t go fast enough
for you, it disappears all too quickly for your parents. And the
answer moves ever further into the future, as we cling to the little
you, hoping you won’t grow up just yet. When Sandi told me your
transition to the toddler room was beginning and I relayed the message
to your father, he said, “What? Did he do something wrong? Was he
too loud?” You happened to be screaming at the time. “No,” I said,
“I think there are other babies who are just as loud as he is.” The
big boy definition will change from your sleeping on a toddler mat to
your first independent steps to your first words to when you ride a
bike to when you walk to school alone to when your voice changes to
when you graduate from high school … It will also include the
negatives like your first tantrum or the day(s)? you cause trouble of
some kind. And of course, now “just like a big boy” means a little
boy instead of a baby, but later it will mean an adolescent, then a
young man. It’s all very exciting and strange, but I still cling to
this elusive baby, even as I am finding new ways to continue to mother
the ever-evolving you.

On Blindness and Marriage

Kristen Witucki — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 01:07:30 +0000

A woman called the Member Services line yesterday asking for books on marriage. Specifically she was concerned about her marriage. She explained that her husband found her to be jealous and insecure, but really, she said, it was because of her blindness, and he should be more understanding. I tried to suggest books on gender differences hindering understanding in marriage, and she said, no, she wanted a book on blindness and marriage. Good luck, lady. She’ll need to write this book. But I felt bad for her, too, as she told me, “I know it’s true! It’s because I’m blind! I was never like this before I became blind! My blind friends say the same thing.”
If only she could understand that blindness is not as much a hallmark of insecurity as the dynamic between the two married parties. If only she could understand that blindness is a physical characteristic, not a mental or emotional state upon which to base excuses. If only making her understand were part of both my job description and my expertise! If only I didn’t feel so personally invested anyway! Sigh

Lost and Found

Kristen Witucki — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 23:58:22 +0000

Dearest Baby,
You’ve probably cried real tears for a while now, but today I
found them particularly heartbreaking. But just as you really cry,
you really laugh, too.
You laughed the first time I got a little bit lost with you. Tad
guides me, and I guide the stroller each day home from daycare, and we
must make quite a parade, walking up North 3rd Ave. and down
Montgomery Street. On Tuesday, we turned up the wrong sidewalk. I
can’t blame this on Tad really, because while he hesitated briefly at
that wrong walkway, he didn’t make a definite turn. I was just glad
to get home. A little alarm in my mind sounded that the sidewalk did
not incline as sharply as it should, but I told myself that it didn’t
incline that much after all. I vaguely noticed that the steps were
different, that the building was on the wrong side of the steps, and
even that someone was watching a British movie (or a movie with
British accents, at least), in our apartment, but then I told myself
that maybe I was really hearing the window of the apartment next door.
In any case, I told Tad to wait at the top of the steps, while I
hauled you in your stroller up the steps, the hardest part of the
trip. You began to crack up, and that’s when I knew, before I
inserted the key into a lock it didn’t fit, that I was at Building
112, the building next door. You laughed again as I hauled you in
your contraption back down the steps, then got you turned around so I
could push the stroller across the small space to Building 110, our
building. Then you laughed as I got you up the correct steps.
Somehow your laughter turned getting lost into a kind of game, even
though I’m sure you really laughed at being carried up and down the
steps like a king or maybe you just enjoyed the surprise element at
the end of your ride. But I’ve never felt comfortable about getting
myself lost and found, and I owe that to you.

Catching Flight: a Tribute to Robert Russell

Kristen Witucki — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 02:20:51 +0000

I am a product support coordinator at Learning Ally, formerly Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Essentially, I teach people with visual impairments or learning disabilities and their parents and teachers how to operate all kinds of accessible technology which helps them to read their books. The aspects of the job which frustrate me are the repetition over the course of a day and the fact that there is not a lot of writing involved. My ideal job would involve word-smithing. The aspect of the job I love is the education when it happens. Usually, I’m the teacher, but sometimes I learn, too.
Some of the learning comes from members who are more technology-savvy than I am. These people do exist, though they are fewer and farther between than some of the other members think. (We deal with those who consider themselves experts but who just aren’t, and we have to gently burst their bubbles). But listening carefully opens us to the real experts, and from these people, I gratefully learn and apply the knowledge to other situations when I can.
Then there are those who impart the life lessons, and such was Dr. Robert Russell, who died on April Fools’ Day while I had flashes forward to the early elementary school years when my son will actually appreciate this holiday. I don’t remember when I met Dr. Russell, but I very quickly found out that there were a few things which set him apart. First, he wanted to order books so that he could both teach and learn from them. There are those who order books merely to talk to someone, and there are those who read for obligation. So to talk to someone who read for pleasure and who communicated that pleasure to others was rare indeed. Secondly, he was friendly without being perverted—in a department whose majority is female, a lot of commiseration occurs about “creepy” male callers. This combination of love of literature and kindness prompted me to do something I have never done with members, to talk about my life outside of work. Many members know I’m blind, but not many know my creative aspirations. I admitted them to the blind booklover, and for the next few years, as long as he remembered, he would always ask what I was reading and why I was still at my current job. As tempted as I was, I did not use the recession as an excuse; I just told him I was still looking. This has been mostly true, though for about a year or so between the MFA and the M.Ed., I actually floundered in nothingness. When I told his son, Richard, about how his father always encouraged me to move on to a new job after his death, Richard wrote back that I had a fine career already, helping his father.
I remember at one point, Dr. Russell told me an acquaintance was interested in turning his book into a play or a movie, and that was when I knew it was a book I must read.
To Catch an Angel was beautiful but heart wrenching. To read about this hero who, like Abraham Nemeth, strived so diligently to work among the sighted with almost no legislation to support him, was humbling. Yet I found that his admonitions to “get a new job” had a sadder side to them, which Richard’s reply made me recollect. After he had finished his doctorate, while he looked for a college job, Dr. Russell had to work in a sheltered workshop for a year. Of this he wrote: “After all these years-after Hamilton, Yale, two years of teaching, and Oxford-to have to go back into a shelter! Since I had left the Institute I had been in open competition with sighted people, and now, when it really mattered, when I had a wife to look after and a whole new life to build, I was being forced back inch by inch, day by day, into the world from which I thought I had broken free.
“Worst of all was being reminded of the shame-not the shame of defeat, but the deep and insidious shame of blindness. Being forced back into the workshop was to be reminded all over again of my inadequacy, all over again to clench my fists in impotent rage, to feel all over again the hot tears scald my cheeks. It was this shame I had yearned to escape from while I was at the Institute, and which the system of segregation so tragically reinforced. It was this of which my life during the last ten years had been so blessedly free-exorcised by friendship and love. To go into the workshop was to go back into the system with all it implied. But I had no choice.”
Moments like these in the book made me wonder whether Dr. Russell felt that a really meaningful job meant escaping helping the blind people I helped. He eventually did get two college jobs teaching literature to sighted students–he held the latter for over 35 years. This strikes me as particularly victorious, since he triumphed before legislation caught up with him. But for him, victory meant escaping working for the blind. And ideally, many of those who are blind should work among the sighted, contributing equally to the sighted world. I also remember that the digital technology we were using was often a struggle for him. When he called about books, always ordering them on the tech line rather than the main line, he was in his element. When he was operating the technology, he was gracious toward us but also seemed to feel a little ashamed. As I got to know him longer, I could feel his memory slipping. I didn’t let on, but with quiet foreboding, I felt the end coming. Perhaps, when he called us, he sometimes felt “blind.”
I wonder if every blind person has chafed, at some time or other, against the possibility of working within the blindness field. I certainly did. I only came to realize I belonged in it when my teaching favored those with disabilities, and my writing struggled to puzzle out what I felt blindness meant. I am fortunate that my first jobs have not been in sheltered workshops, where the final goal was putting pieces together. I work with real people, helping them to the best of my ability. So for me, blindness is not my reason for striving to move onward, however slowly. As I explained to Dr. Russell’s son in a reply, I want to escape the administrative and repetetive aspects of the job, though I know all jobs contain a certain amount of repetition and administration. As he completed that long year of piecework, Dr. Russell put in a regiment of reading to keep his mind agile, and this is what I have continued to do throughout my studies. And he eventually did find a career he truly loved. I thank Dr. Russell for giving me the key to flight from a job I like to, I hope, others I will love.

Do Unto Others

Kristen Witucki — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 01:50:01 +0000

I’m published on the Support for Special Needs website. Check it out
here.

Our Eyes

Kristen Witucki — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:19:47 +0000

I was born prematurely, and my eyes never developed. I say “and” rather than “so,” because I’m not sure if that was a consequence of the premature birth or of something else. I think that by the 80s, they had perfected the amount of oxygen delivered in incubators, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, because my eyes never developed, I have prostheses inside my eyes, shells which fit over the eyeballs and lend them shape, depth and color. My natural eyes are whiteish, red when they get irritated, but the prostheses make them blue, like those of my birth family. The prostheses are expensive and needed to be remade often when I was little. I haven’t had a new set since I was fifteen, though I’ve gone in for cleaning and polishing a few times since then. I’m sure someday soon the doctor, who has been in practice as long as I have been around, will try to sell me on a new set, and I will cringe, because they are a couple thousand dollars I just don’t have.
The most vivid memory of getting new “eyepieces,” as my mom called them and as I familiarly call them, occurred when I was nine. First, I went to a regular ophthalmologist who had to write a letter on my behalf to get the eyepieces. I don’t know why, as I didn’t at the time. It may have been a doctor’s note for school, or it may have gone to the insurance company or to the doctor who would make them for me. I’m not quite sure. I remember sentences about my having gotten the shells when I was two and “she is now nine years old.” Then after I got my new body parts, my brother, Chet, realized that, since these parts were made for me, I could theoretically get any color I wanted. “You could get purple eyes!” he said with real longing and envy in his voice. “You could get snake eyes!”
Years later, I remember riding in a car operated by disability paratransit services in New Jersey, and the driver said, “You have beautiful eyes. They look just like Jesus’s eyes.” I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, although I am sure some form of prosthelitizing occurred, but I do remember the thought that it served him right that he was unknowingly comparing Jesus’s eyes to pieces of plastic since he was subscribing to the blond, blue-eyed Christ.
For you, blue eyes were transient. They have shifted to brown, just as your sounds have shifted to make way for your concentration on grasping objects, and Goodnight Moon changed from merely the first book I read to you to the first book you held in your hands along with my hands. But for you, brown will be the permanent eye color. I struggle to find pieces of myself in you sometimes, but I think they linger in the shapes of things, while James is in your coloring. Your eyes and forehead and head are shaped like mine, for instance. But your face is very James to me and to most people, except maybe my sister. Your face, hair and eye color and expressions are those of your father. Your skin color is a blend of both of us. Your hair is straight like mine now, but I think that will change as well. I find myself most, perhaps unfortunately, in your temperament, at least your way of getting scared sometimes that I won’t feed you or your sadness about transitions: leaving my breast, being placed on the changing table. But I also find myself in the way you are starting to listen to short books already, your need to hear them again and again and again.
It occurred to me in the shower just now that next time I get new eyepieces, if I can ever afford them, I could change my eyes so they are brown like yours and your father’s. Although I kept my birth name, my eyes could eschew those of my birth family and adopt the look of my new chosen family. But I’m not sure that that is ethical somehow. And I wonder whether there will ever be a time, if only a few moments, when you’ll want your eyes to be blind like ours.