Awkward Moments with the Disabled

One of my favorite sitcoms, The King of Queens, seems to center its humor on social faux pas. There were many times watching that show – such as when Doug and Carrie go to great lengths to make sure they get credit for their donation to the school library – that I wanted to cringe and hide in shame. I did this even though I was not involved in the situation, and the situation was purely fictional.

Some of the situations in this essay might make you feel that way, and that feeling of vicarious shame might not be too far from how I felt at the time. Some of the shame I felt was indirect but uncomfortable nonetheless.

Very recently, I was working on writing a short story involving a girl and a wheelchair. I wanted to create a scenario with the wheelchair that was embarrassing to the girl. I don't have a lot of personal experience with wheelchairs, other than pushing my octogenarian mother all over Dollywood in one, so I went to the Internet for help. I came across an article where the writer lists all sorts of potentially awkward situations with a wheelchair that the disabled sometimes face. These included things like rolling out of control on an incline or accidentally rolling over somebody's foot, but it also included things that didn't directly involve a wheelchair but the person in it, things like strangers staring uncomfortably, people talking extra slowly because they assume there's a mental handicap and even patting a disabled adult on the head. It made me wonder if I had somehow been involved in any awkward situations with the disabled, and I could think of a few.

As the article writer explained, staring from strangers can be a problem for the disabled. When I was working in a newspaper office, I often came across a woman in a wheelchair as I made my daily trek down a couple of blocks from my office to the Dunkin Donuts for coffee. I often would see her coming down the street towards the Dunkin Donuts just as I was leaving and moving back towards her. I would spot her while she was still a ways off, and I was exaggeratedly conscious that I should neither stare at her nor ignore or seem to ignore her. It seems simple enough to do, but my sensitivity was so heightened, that I was always afraid I was doing it wrong.

I read once, that in ordinary situations, where two Americans are approaching each other on the sidewalk, we would find it strange to make eye contact too soon or to keep it steadily, but as you get closer to the other person, you can then make eye contact and perhaps say “Hello” or be friendly. Most of us do this without analyzing it in everyday situations. With this woman, it was like I was exceedingly conscious of the whole process. Then, when I did smile or say “Hello,” I was in doubt of whether she really wanted my attention. You may have experienced that some strangers welcome friendliness and will chat with you, and others act like they would prefer to be ignored. Why, I wonder, could I not have been more natural?

An even more awkward situation happened involving a woman in a wheelchair, a manual one, years earlier, while I was working in a bookstore. This customer happened to come to the store during a very busy season before Christmas when our store headquarters was overwhelming us with shipments of gift products. Our bathroom, mostly used by the employees, was ADA compliant, but on that particular day, the hallway leading to the bathroom certainly wasn't.

We had a relatively small, very narrow, stock room, and we just couldn't manage to store and deal with the amount of shipments we were getting. We put some of our excess boxes in that hallway. That was the day that this woman decided she desperately needed the bathroom.

It sounds, potentially, very embarrassing, but, really, it could have been much, much worse. For one, this woman was very nice and very gracious and didn't seem to blame us or put shame on us for the situation that was highly inconvenient to her. I was just a worker, not the store manager. Secondly, she was able to communicate to me very well how I could help her. I didn't know what kind of disability she had, but she, apparently, was not a quadriplegic or paraplegic and did have some ability to use her legs. Once she advanced as far as she could through the hallway in her chair, she had me help to pull her up, and she was able to support herself against the wall and the stack of boxes on the other side and make her way through the narrow passage to the bathroom.

If she had needed my assistance in the bathroom, that would have been an entirely new level of embarrassing, but she was able to manage it herself. If she was really desperate for that kind of help, I hope my sense of compassion would overrule my other feelings, but that situation would have been awkward for both of us. I did have to help her on her way out again. I felt badly that the situation was so inconvenient to her, and this encounter was one I will never forget.

The last scenario is, by far, the worst. Several years ago, I went out to eat with new friends. One of these new friends had a good friend with cerebral palsy who accompanied us on this occasion. Our new disabled friend was not able to use his voice, but he was able to communicate through technology, through a speech generation device. I remember a funny one-liner he delivered through his machine after we bounced back and forth between two restaurants, trying to figure out which had the shorter waiting time. After he finished laboriously typing, his machine pronounced, “We are playing musical restaurants.”

His buddy was quite comfortable with him and assisting him in whatever he might need. The fourth girl in our party was not, and that became apparent once we were seated in the restaurant and the helpful buddy was in the ladies' room temporarily. A waiter delivered bread sticks to our table. My other female friend offered one from the basket to our new friend with cerebral palsy. He gripped it in an awkward way, and my female friend realized he might need some assistance to eat. She told him to wait for his buddy to come back from the bathroom.

That doesn't seem like too disastrous a situation so far. We didn't have our entrees yet, and I'm sure our new friend had the patience to wait for his buddy. But what followed was extremely awkward. After this, my female friend made an extreme effort not to look his direction anymore. I almost remember that she put up a hand to screen her face. I'm not sure that part of my memory is accurate, but it was very obvious that she was avoiding looking at him.

It put me in an extremely awkward position. I wanted our new friend in a wheelchair to feel included. He was, evidently, intelligent and funny and, even if communication was a little challenging, he could listen and understand as well as have his machine talk for him. My conversations with this particular female friend always centered around her doing practically all the talking and me listening, and this is what she did now. I don't think I got a word in edgewise, and I felt helpless to make our new friend feel comfortable. I probably looked his way a couple of times, but there didn't seem to be much I could do, short of embarrassing her and calling her out, which I didn't do. I'm sure our disabled friend was picking up on her body language, and I was truly mortified. Worse, I was worried he would think my feelings were similar.

The tension was relieved in a little while when the buddy returned from the bathroom. My other female friend seemed to act more naturally after that. Even now, I still don't understand why she avoided looking at him. She acted very flustered after she passed him the bread stick. Perhaps, her own feelings of awkwardness and uncertainty of how to help him caused her to avoid him, but didn't she understand she was making the situation much worse and being hurtful? Did her concern for herself make her blind to that?

These are the situations I reflect on from time to time when considering the needs of the disabled, which, hopefully, might help me better deal with situations in the future or inspire others to have better understanding and compassion.