How do you handle it when there is someone disabled that you happen to see

I was not staring. I was just looking and I have looked that way before. But just because the boy was in a wheelchair he made a point of criticizing me. I was not gaping, but he made such an issue that when there is someone who is crippled or handicapped, I will go the other way. The thing about it I had been a bit afraid of people who have handicaps and I have been trying to get over it, you know the "It could have been me thing," but now all that work to overcome my fear has gone to naught.

I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. If he was criticizing you, he has more going wrong than his handicaps. Perhaps he has something going on "upstairs" that's not quite right.

If the person you were "looking" at catches your eye, do you look away in guilt as though caught doing something wrong? Or are you able to smile and say "Hello" like you might with anyone who is not disabled? It makes a lot of difference. I am fairly newly disabled and only started using motorized carts in the stores just before Christmas a year and a half ago. It was very embarrassing to me at first. I have had various reactions but not a lot of staring. I have confronted the same rude people who would be just as rude were I still able to walk around the stores. Then I have encountered those who are gracious. Nothing wrong with looking around and being a people watcher. But if when you are watching someone for a longer time than is really necessary, it can be considered staring whether you meant to be staring or not. But it sounds like two issues in your post. One is your attention to the boy in the wheelchair, and the other your husband's reaction to your watching this boy and how you felt about it. That sounds like there is an issue between the two of you that you might want to discuss in private and suggest that in the future, such comments need to be made in private rather out in the public arena where everyone else can hear and where you are made to feel embarrassed. If that doesn't work, then I guess you will have to decide if you can live with his public reactions and comments or if you would rather just not accompany him out in public. Or whatever else you decide to do, which might even be to ignore all this and do nothing.

I have a white cane. I walk a little differetly because of poor balance. I get so SICK of questions, like I'm a curiosity of some sort. I know people need to be educated, but teachers get a break now and then. Why don't disabled people?

I totally agree! Well said, I get tired of putting on my educator hat as well. But I'd rather have them ask then stare or make stupid assumptions.

I stare at everybody and where I live there are lots of people in walkers, and in those scooters and we are the fat capital of Canada. I think my husband was wrong, because I did not stare, I just turned around and when we had our coffee, he walked right by them close up. If he did not want me to look at them, he could have walked the way we usually do when we have our coffee- through the middle. So he made a point so that I got curious. I have seen many disabled people before and I know a girl who is not only disabled, but has a mind of a child and her mother brings her to the Mall every time, but they were going out the door before I had a chance to say, Hi. Now if I happen to run into them and my husband is with me, I dare not say anything.

Hope it isnt around any more and the Fathers of the Catholic church cant marry either. Guess thats why they go after the kids now huh? Or the nuns along time ago

th is hard for alot of little kids just cause you couldnt sayit then was no reason for them to put you there! And is wrong for a church to do that for him trying to kill himself they needed to help him!

It was a fake church. It took the Bible wrong. It said the apostles were single and that if you want to be a minister you donot marry and it showed a lack of forgiveness. There was a woman who joined who had been a mistress of a rich man, she gave up that life, and they did not forgive her. I mean none of the widowers asked her to marry him and she had a son who was around fourteen.

It was a fake Church. I am glad I am no longer a member. And he was kicked out because he tried to kill himself and that was because his brother was a homosexual. That was in the 1970s. I left the church, went through the usual searching until I found the one I go to. My husband rejected God and the church altogether. I pray for him all the time.

I am good at talking to total strangers and I did work at a place with children with disabilities, when I was in my twenties, but they did not like me because I was always talking to the children as if they did not have disabilities. (We were to show pity and condescension) so that did not last long and it did not help me with adoption anyway. (You know, there is an assumption that if you cannot bear children that God is punishing you and you have no maternal instincts and you have to show how loving you are of children who are disabled or of a different race, etc. Utter nonsense, of course.) Oh and the people in walkers, there is my husband who had a slight stroke and when we see a woman of 60 plus in a walker, he says she's sixty, and you might end up that way, then he says that we are old. So I try to avoid them as much as possible. It is as almost as he wished I was in a walker or a wheelchair.

I was always nervous around people in wheelchairs, etc. and I did not know how to speak to them. I did not want to make a big fuss or go especially out of my way, but felt that I was being pressured to make a point of being extra ordinary nice to them. He did make a spectacle. I am sure if he had not done all that rigamoralle, and just asked for help, no one would have said anything.

I know it can be difficult to know how to talk to someone in a wheelchair or with some other kind of disability. Let me help you out there. Just try to accept that the chair might be different than the kind of chair you sit in, but the person in the chair is just the same. So speak to him or her the same way you would someone who was not disabled. It can take practice, and if you are truly interested in learning more about this, try volunteering at your local nursing home. There are lots of wonderful people living there who are in various stages of disability and are in wheelchairs, or using cains or walkers, or can't hear or see. They love company and love to talk. Mostly it will just take a simple open ended question and you might not have to talk much at all...they will do it all just to have someone to talk to. It will greatly help you get more comfortable around people with disabilities.

I can tell if someone is faking. Do they not moan and groan only when the attention is on them?

I never told anyone that they are faking. I am not an expert. There is the insurance companies that find out. And if your doctor said you need crutches maybe you can shove the doctor's instructions in her face. I never even ask questions unless it is an older man, and then I assume that he fell on the bomb to save his comrades. so I ask about the war and in most cases, it is a war injury and that is because when I was a baby, the Second World War was on so when I see someone older than me like in their eighties, I tend to think of the disability as a war injury. I do wonder about those in those scooters though. My mother-in-law thinks that once you get in one, if you cannot walk that good (she had bad hips and they were almost gone) you will never get out. I do not know if they need the scooters, the disabled people who use them, whether it is because they walk too slow that a car would run over them before they cross the street, or whether they are so crippled, and would have to rely on a wheelchair anyway. I guess it is the same with walkers, before people used canes and had someone to help them, now it is the walkers.

I try not to judge whether or not someone is faking. I was definitely NOT faking it, although some outright accused me of such, and although rumors were spread around that I was faking, and although this went on for many years and I have lost some friends because of this. (One woman, a former best friend, actually told me to my face that I am faking my disabilities and to never speak to her again. Of course, she never bothered to consult my doctors first before doing that.) Unless we are that person's medical doctor, I don't think it's our business to make that kind of judgment. We don't really know all the details.

I just look long enough to see the whole person, but I am a sucker for babies, and I usually smile at them and if possible try to speak to their mothers and say how adorable they are and how old is he or she or what his or her name is. So it should be the mothers of the babies who should complain not the people in wheelchairs or in walkers. So how is it in Manitou? Is it a small town? I have some friends who live in Carmen, it is not near there, is it?

I do fiction writing, mostly novels. I do have a blog listed on my profile, and I have done some article writing, but not good at that stuff. I am better at writing novels, and I am on the sixth draft of my novel. It is not finished yet and I will have to do three more drafts. It seems my character will not cooperate. I have some fan fiction, but with myLot I do not have the time to pursue that. I do have one article published and I won an Alfred Hitchcock contest once.

Hi again, I can relate to your approach with babies...it is something I do as well. I also agree with looking without staring and taking in the whole person. So we are on the same page on that one too. We love Manitou...it is a friendly, safe, clean community. We moved here in December of 1994 and then left to pursue our dream of having an acreage in the Lake of the Woods. After a couple of years we moved back to the very house we left and are sooooo glad that everything worked out the way it did. We love our home, Manitou, the Pembina Valley and rolling hills surrounding our little town. The property taxes are way lower than Winnipeg as well. Carman is about 45 minutes from where we are. It has an interesting "feel" talking to someone from our old home town. Often we are chatting with people in places much further away than that. What type of writing do you do? I have a column in the The Aquarian that comes out 4 times a year called Perspectives on Healthy Living. I have also written for Alive magazine and the Healthy Living Guide out of Vancouver. In the last couple of years I have been doing photojournalism work for a number of local newspapers. Great chatting with you...and look forward to more! Raia

I think of staring as taking a long time to look at a person. My eyes wandered all over the place. I am also looking for anyone I know at the same time. Now had I known that boy in the wheelchair, I would have said hi anyway, but I never got a chance to find out -is five seconds a stare?

I was not staring at him, just looking and I looked as long as I look at anyone else. It was just that my husband made a point of it. The boy was too busy talking to his sisters to notice anything other than them. Also there is a store behind him, and I usually look that way or rather take a panoramic view of things. It is as if I was told I did something wrong when I was just being normal, observing people.

I hope that I did not confuse you, or make you feel as if I was insulting you. You sort of confused me yourself by your discussion, but I do appreciate your clarification. People take staring in all different ways, wherein you were just taking a glance, your husband may have thought that you appeared to be staring.

I observe everyone, so for me to look at someone who is disabled is just as natural to me as my looking at that cute baby, or the couple talking to each other, etc. So it was not that I was bug-eyed and bushy tailed staring at that boy. I was just looking. I am also interested in what people are saying. I get quite a few ideas, like we were in Tim Hortons once and there was this mechanic talking about his work and he would never recommend a -- I forgot what it was, so I am an observer.

I tried to tell my husband that, but would he listen? He just kept on with his lecture. I mean I do not ignore people, I am a people watcher.

I look all over the place, so I cannot just ignore that boy and go all over the place with everyone else. I think two or three seconds is not staring, do you or is there a difference between looking at someone with a disability then with other people? I mean here I am in Winnipeg and I see disabled people all the time, there is always someone with a limp, using a walker or a wheelchair, that I cannot avoid it. Does that mean for healthy people I can look for three seconds but for disabled the time limit should be one second?

There should be no difference really. If you stare at me, I would also feel insecure and I would think that you are thinking of something bad about me. It's just that when we see disabled person, sometimes we do not notice that we are staring at them for a long time already because we get curious of their looks and things like how do they handle it.

I was just looking the same way as I look at everyone else. It was just that my husband thinks I should not even look at them for one second, that I should just read the Coffee News and drink my coffee. And I would never fuss over them. I do not like treating people as special, to me it is sort of worshiping them.

I was just looking at this boy as I look at everyone else. I was not gawking and it was just that the boy was young and in a wheelchair that my husband got upset, and started that long lecture. As I said previous in this post, I was nervous around handicapped people because when I was around five or so, I could not pronounce the th and they put me in this place with children who were severely disfigured or strange looking because of several mental handicaps, and that scared me for a long time. It made me so that I wanted people to be know for being people and that what was inside of them, not what they looked like outside. I mean maybe I should have just said look as I look at everyone else or you would not have thought I had my mouth gaping over and my eyes like saucers.

Thanks. I do not like single people out as what they look like or whether they cannot do what others do. I do not even like it when people get promotions and adulation on their disabilities or color. I would expect that they are embarrassed by that. It is as if they are important because of their looks and not what is inside of them.

I look at everyone and it would not look right for me to look at everyone else and then just ignore them. So the next time I see a disabled person who is with people who are not, I just turn my head and just look at the ones that are not, right? Is that just as bad or worse because you are encouraging them to be ignored? No wonder I feel nervous around people in walkers and wheelchairs. You cannot look at them as you look at other people, and yet that leads to me thinking that they are very special. Anyway I was not staring. I just glanced over. I mean that was a very unusual wheelchair. I guess he was able to raise it up by a switch.

There is a lady in the church on the other side of the district where I live that has a daughter who is not only mentally retarded, but severely so. She has the mind of a small child She is in a special wheelchair that lies down and she also has cerebral palsy. She cannot do more than shriek or make gestures. We do not know how long she will be on this world, but every time I see her, I feel like crying. I do not know what to say, but I do not turn away when I see them. I just smile. My husband's sister is in a wheelchair having several strokes and possible Lou Gehrig's disease that left her almost paralyzed, unable to swallow water, can think but the nerve centers of her brain do not connect and my husband does not want to see her because he would be so upset. Me I am more nervous about people with disabilities, but we see so many in wheelchairs and walkers that it is so common.

It seems my husband figures I cannot just look at them, he figures either I should turn away or show a lot of sympathy and go up and help them. To me, I do not want to do either. If I know them, I will say hi, but with my husband's attitude I am inclined to go and ask if they need any help, so making their disabilities count more than the person, it puts me in dire straits. So I am fighting the see them as a person and the see them as a disability and when I read your response it seems that you want me to do the latter. I hope I am wrong.

If I see them and they see me, I smile and say hi, but that boy in the wheelchair was so engrossed talking to his sisters, that a bomb could have gone off right besides him and he would not have flinched.