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BIRTHDAY BLUES OR BIRTHDAY BLISS
Copyright (c) 1996-2002 by Wendy Wolf
You know how people get holiday depressions? Some people even get depressed over birthdays, feeling they are an ominous reminder of growing older and, somehow, growing older is negative. I was as guilty as most of that attitude, looking in the mirror for the telltale signs of being "over thirty" and then "over forty."
I also used to wonder why "somebody" didn't do something about this or that problem I faced in life. As a disabled person in a wheelchair, one of the greatest social problems I faced was an almost total lack of dates. As a teenager I actually wished my mother would pay someone to date me. In later years I remember saying to myself and others, "Why doesn't somebody create a dating service for people with disabilities?"
A few years ago on my birthday, May 10th, I was looking in my "over forty" mirror and I had an epiphany as a flood of "why doesn't somebody" thoughts occurred to me. "Why doesn't somebody invent a wrinkle cream that makes laugh lines disappear?" "Why doesn't somebody open a dancing school for people in wheelchairs?" And my old favorite, "Why doesn't somebody create a dating service for people with disabilities?" Then it dawned on me, why SOMEBODY, why not ME?
If I was going to sit around and complain for the rest of my life, I'd probably be asking the same questions of my "over fifty" and "over sixty" and "over seventy" face in the mirror. Why wait for somebody else to do it? If I believed it was so important to do it, I would do it.
Not being a cosmetic chemist or dance artist, I left the wrinkle cream and wheelchair dance school to others. Instead I concentrated on the problem that had made my adolescence and early adult life so painful, dating, or more accurately, the almost total absence of it.
I had polio when I was 4 and a half years old. At first I was completely paralyzed and had serious respiratory complications, so I was put in an iron lung for several months. I spent many years in and out of hospitals with lots of surgery and physical therapy.
I was fortunate to have a wonderful most supportive family who treated me like my siblings, and not like I was different. I'd come home from the hospital in N.Y. on the weekends and had many friends to play with. I engaged in the same activities they did. I sat in my wheelchair with roller skates on and played the wounded teacher, I had a hoola hoop that fit around my wheelchair, and played the mommy in the never ending game of house. Things were great, I knew I had a disability, but I didn't feel different.
Suddenly I became a teenager and my friends became teenagers too. Their worlds went on, but mine stopped. Now I wasn't doing what they were doing, my hormones were, but my mind and body weren't. I couldn't talk about the boy who liked me because there wasn't one. I couldn't talk about the party last night because I wasn't invited. And I couldn't talk about that first kiss because that came many years later.
I know many of you who may be disabled can relate to the same kind of experiences in your own lives. The loneliness and isolation that we sometimes feel can certainly be more debilitating than the disability itself. Perhaps it is my mission to give to others what I desperately wanted in my teenage and young adult years.
With that in mind, I took $200 of my own money and set about creating a dating service for people with disabilities. I never liked the term disabled, knowing so many highly capable people who happened to have a disability, but excelled in other areas. So I wanted to incorporate the term "differently abled" in the name of my new service. Poring over a dictionary and a thesaurus, dozens of anachronyms using the letters "DA" were considered, the winner being D.A.W.N., Differently Abled Winner's Network, because I also believe that having romance and love in one's life is an essential ingredient to being a winner. Besides, I like what the name implies, love providing an awakening to a new and better life.
Since my birthday three years ago, I no longer look in the mirror and worry about the passing years. Now each new birthday I have means another year of providing a service that has grown and provided so many positive experiences for so many deserving people. I measure success not in monetary terms, because in all honesty D.A.W.N. still barely supports itself, and not necessarily in the traditional marriages and engagements, although we are proud and delighted that we have brought about several of these. I consider just as important and successful the people for whom D.A.W.N. has brought love and companionship where formerly there was none; some who in mid life have experienced their first date, their first kiss, their first intimacy.
Providing this kind of service can never grow old, and making each birthday the initiation or another milestone in some positive endeavor can banish the fear of growing old or weary. D.A.W.N. has added to the quality of my life as well as to the quality of my clients lives. The longevity of my years on earth can never make me blue because now my birthdays measure the longevity of a joyous endeavor that brings me bliss.
You too can choose to experience bliss, rather than blues, each time your birthday rolls around. Just do something positive with it, let each birthday become a new beginning, a new awakening to new horizons, a new dawn.
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