In Sickness and in Health by Ben Mattlin

Author:Ben Mattlin [Mattlin, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5855-8
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

DORENE AND STEVE

M.L. IS FEEDING ME DINNER, skillfully maneuvering a forkful of rotisserie chicken into my eager but tight-jawed mouth. I try to facilitate with my tongue and lips, but there’s a problem. “Too big,” I manage to say, despite my overwhelmed mandibles.

“It’s tiny.”

“Not to me,” I say, spitting some into my napkin.

It looks rude, and I wouldn’t do it in public. But I don’t want to gag or choke. M.L. knows this. She understands that I require baby-sized bites because of my swallowing difficulties, though sometimes she forgets just how small or gets a little adventurous. To be honest, some days I’m pickier than others.

I also know that she feeds me better than anyone else. If I had to rely on friends, family, and paid people to feed me all the time, instead of just at breakfast and lunch, I’d be even skinnier than I am. With other feeders, so much food ends up on my shirt I sometimes just want to give up. The two years that M.L. did all my feeding, when the girls were infants and we had to let all the hired help go so we could afford to have M.L. stay home with them, were my fattest—in a good, healthy way. Ever since, keeping weight on has become a problem for me.

After talking to Alison and John, who plainly function well apart from each other, and Laurie and Tim, who seem to prefer to be as involved in each other’s lives as possible, I’m thinking a lot about how I meet my nutritional needs. In eating as in all other aspects of life, I like to believe I could manage fine on my own, if I had to rely solely on paid help, say. But honestly, I’m not 100 percent sure. I used to cope without M.L., of course, but that was decades ago. We’ve been together so long, it’s hard to know anymore how either of us would manage solo. Looking back, there’s no doubt M.L. aided my escape from parental control, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have flown free otherwise, does it? That’s not why I fell for her. I can’t deny M.L. is a natural-born helper. She worked as a nanny in college and became an elementary school teacher not just because she likes kids; she also likes being of service. She’s the sort of person who will go out of her way to inform a stranger of an untied shoelace. But is that the reason we’re together and have stayed together—because I need so much physical help and she needs to be helpful?

M.L. says no and that I should stop fishing for compliments. But to settle my troubled mind, I set out to gain a fresh perspective from another long-lasting interabled couple. And I can think of few better examples than my old friend Dorene Giacopini and her husband, Steve Wilson. Dorene and I were at Harvard together, in Quincy House, the dorm for upperclassmen (and upperclasswomen) where the esteemed university put its physically disabled students in those days.

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