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Like a lot of teenagers, I had my first driving lesson a few months
before my sixteenth birthday. Dad had an old ‘64 Chevy that had
a manual transmission with the gearshift located on the steering
column. He took me out to the driveway one afternoon and told me
to get behind the steering wheel. I started the engine, shifted
into reverse, let the clutch out, and almost wrecked the car by
backing into a tree. Ouch! I missed the tree, but I think
Dad may have had second thoughts about my getting behind the wheel.
I know my neighbor did. Her car was parked in the driveway, only
a few feet away from the tree that I almost demolished. She
rushed out of her house and moved the car onto the street. I
don’t know what she was afraid of. I’d been driving for a good
three minutes by the time she came out, and I hadn’t had even one
accident in all that time. Near misses don’t count.
I had always assumed that I’d be able to drive.
Why not? I had always done everything else I wanted to do.
Why should driving be any different? All I had to do was get my
driving permit, take driver’s ed., and pass the road test.
Nothing to it, right? Believe it or not, it was almost that
simple. I think I had to get my doctor’s okay to get a permit,
but once I learned to stay away from trees, everything else came easy.
I had trouble with two things on the day of the
test: backing up and giving hand signals. I paid more
attention to how I held the steering wheel than to the direction in
which the car was headed. I knew how to back up. But I was
so busy showing the examiner that I knew how to drive, I didn’t even
think about where I was going.
As for the signaling, that’s another story.
The examiner asked me to give a right hand signal. Because my
window was shut (and because I have more control in my right hand than
I do in my left), I stopped the car, rolled down the window with my
right hand, started driving again, and then proceeded to give the
appropriate hand signal. That’s not the kind of thing that most
people do while taking the road test. Yet I couldn’t give a
signal with the window closed, and opening it with my left hand might
have been disastrous. The examiner questioned me afterward about
stopping the car but then went ahead and passed me anyway. He
must have figured that if I was cautious enough to avoid doing
something I deemed unsafe during a road test, I would probably make a
good driver. That was only a few weeks after my sixteenth
birthday, and I’ve been driving ever since.
Other people may take their driver’s licenses for
granted. Not me. I’m well aware of the fact that if I had
been born just a little more disabled, I wouldn’t be able to drive.
Even with the control that I do have in my arms and legs, I’ve still
had my license questioned on numerous occasions. Every time I
go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, I know ahead of time what to
expect—questions about my disability. It never fails. No
matter how good a driver I’ve been, my cerebral palsy always becomes
an issue.
I never will forget the time when the guy behind
the desk at the DMV looked at me and asked, “What seems to be the
problem?” What kind of a question is that, anyway? I
didn’t have a problem. I may have had cerebral palsy, but I
didn’t have a problem.
Now, I don’t want to indict all the DMV employees
in the country. They’re only doing their jobs, and I understand
that. If I were in their shoes and saw me coming through the
door, I’d question my ability to drive, too. However, having
said that, I also want it known how much I dislike going to the DMV.
It’s more than just the inconvenience of answering a few questions
about my disability. I hate everything about it. I hate
the lines, I hate the questions, and I hate the road tests. But
above all, I hate having to prove myself to the state just because of
my disability. That’s what it comes down to—being forced to
prove myself over and over again to people who wouldn’t even know my
name if they didn’t happen to have a government job.
I grow tired of constantly being confronted by
people who make an issue of my disability, not only at the DMV, but
everywhere. The only difference between the people at the DMV
and every other person who questions my competency is that I can
ignore everyone else. I can’t do that with the state. I
can’t just refuse to show up at the DMV when it’s time to renew my
license—not if I want to go on driving legally.
For me, my driver’s license is much more than
just a piece of paper from the state acknowledging the fact that I am
capable of operating a motor vehicle. It provides me with a
freedom that I wouldn’t otherwise have. It enables me to do the
things that are important to me without having to rely on other people
for transportation. If I want to go out for a hamburger on the
spur of the moment, I can. If I want to take an afternoon off
and drive to the beach for a few hours of fresh air and sunshine, I
can. And if I want to visit a friend or go to a movie, I can do
that, too. Driving gives me the freedom to do what I want to do,
when I want to do it.
Like just about everyone else, I like my
independence. But for me, knowing that the state has the power
to take some of that freedom away just because I have cerebral palsy
is very frightening. Every time I go to the DMV and wait for my
turn in line, my whole way of life is at stake. With one failed
driving test, my independence, something that I’ve worked for all my
life, could be taken away from me. That scares me. I know
that there are millions of people in this country who, for one reason
or another, are unable to drive. And I also know that most of
those people lead very productive and rewarding lives. But the
prospect of someday losing my license is something that frightens me
in a way that not much else does.
Part of me is ashamed of my anxiety about losing
my license. I feel that I ought to be able to snap my fingers,
trust God for the future, and not worry about whether the day might
come when I will lose my independence. Perhaps I ought to be
able to do that, but I can’t—at least not yet. No matter how old
I get, or how many years of driving experience I put behind me, the
fear of losing my independence is something that never leaves me.
Why is driving so important to me? When I
first began writing this chapter, I believed that the reason I place
so much importance on having my license is the independence it brings
me. But now that I have had a chance to reflect more about it,
I’m not so sure that’s true. I think that my fears have more to
do with my pursuit of normalcy than with anything else. I want
to be normal. I want people to look at me as they would at any
other person and see past my disability to the real person inside.
No, that’s not quite it, either. What I really want is for
people not to see the disability. I wish that I could go through
life as almost everyone else does and not have to deal with being
different. But, of course, that’s impossible, isn’t it?
Because no matter how much I want my cerebral palsy to vanish, it’s
always with me. And although I live a very active and productive
life, I also live with the constant fear of being exposed for who I
really am, a man disabled with cerebral palsy.
There it is again. That awful “D” word.
That’s why I hate going to the DMV so much. The person who has
the job of renewing my license has also been given the responsibility
of deciding whether or not I will keep my license. And that
decision is based, at least in part, on an examination of my
disability.
I don’t like being required to have my disability
looked at by people I don’t know. The whole experience forces me
to take a closer look at myself. And the bottom line is that I
don’t like what I see. I don’t like being disabled. Every
time I go to the DMV to renew my license, I’m forced to acknowledge
that I, Steven Gene Chance, am disabled. And I resent it.
Over the years, many friends have told me that
they don’t notice my disability. They used to notice, they say,
but now that they know me, they see only the real me. The
implication, of course, is that my disability isn’t the real me.
My personality is the real me, and my cerebral palsied body is only a
superfluous appendage that should be overlooked in order to get at the
real person inside.
I know they mean well, but sometimes people can
do more harm than good by what they say. Cerebral palsy,
disability, whatever you choose to call it—that’s the real me.
It may not be all of me, but it is at least part of me. To
pretend otherwise is to ignore the obvious. Like it or not, I am
disabled.
The hard part is living with the reality of
cerebral palsy. Life would be much easier if that reality didn’t
exist. But because it does exist, I do the next best thing by
living behind a facade of normalcy. That way I don’t have to
deal with all the garbage that comes with being disabled.
Except, of course, when my disability is brought to my attention.
And no one does that better than the folks at the DMV.
There may be some who will argue that, as a
Christian, I should recognize my value to God and live my life
accordingly. Although that may be true, it is easier said than
done. I know that my worth comes from God, and I am profoundly
grateful for what he’s done in my life. However, what I’m
talking about here has more to do with how I see myself than it does
with whether or not I am valued by God. My value to God is a
given. It’s my perception that’s clouded, not my actual worth.
I have a lifetime of experiences telling me that no matter what I do,
I’ll never measure up to the expectations of others. Somewhere
along the line, a part of me has come to believe that those
perceptions of others about me are true, that I really am as
inadequate as some people seem to think.
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