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As it had turned out, some
of the people we met were great at dancing the Polka. It was so much fun,
I thought. I danced every opportunity, whether it was in someone’s two car
garage, my wide screened in back porch or wherever. My new friends had
their curiosity aroused because I was willing to readily dance at their
parties.
“Hey girl!” Someone called to me “We just wanted to know where you learned
to Polka like that?”
“Why, you taught me, of
course.” I laughed as we swung back and forth, around and around on the
floor. The music was all the beer-barrel Polka music that no one would
have been able to resist. I knew they would never understand if I tried to
explain to them about the Flaming Arrow where the students at the boarding
school attended went every night to dance. Let them think what they wanted
about party girls or whatever they might be wondering. It was just too
much fun to turn down the chance to enjoy myself so much. Rodney could
never seem to learn to dance, or so he said. He could waltz a bit but was
never comfortable and really didn’t seem to enjoy it. So here it was, I
could dance with a kid, with another lady, with some older man or younger
boy, it didn’t matter, it was all for the joy of dancing and I loved it.
Meanwhile, on a daily basis
and along with meeting attendance, service during the day, I kept up with
the therapy they had taught me at the center. Rhonda had been fitted with
braces and, although it was like putting a knife in my heart to see her in
them, I persevered. The therapist wanted her to stand a certain length of
time in the unbending steel staves. The idea was to try to teach her
balance and give her the chance to use her legs. I had to put her against
the wall and not leave her even for a second because she had absolutely no
balance. Evidently, the part of her brain to control that was injured. The
minute the braces were taken off she crumpled into a heap and it was as if
she never experienced the thought of standing at all. It was all a little
like swimming in quick sand. The depths were dark and endless, there were
no life guards, nothing to tell a person where a safe place might be or
what would really work to save her life not just for the day but longer
than that.
As much as I loved my new
friends, the joy shared with them and the lovely home where we lived there
was a restlessness with me. No one told me this therapy wasn’t going to
work but I had looked around me at the center and I saw for myself how
this was simply a means of making an attempt to do something for the
children they housed for whatever reason. Maybe it was to placate their
parents and possibly they believed in what they were doing. For me, it was
obvious this wasn’t the answer for Rhonda’s condition. I was wondering
what would happen when it came time for her to attend school. There wasn’t
even a dream of special education at the time. The center had already told
me they wouldn’t treat her unless they had her full time and I wasn’t
going to do that. I was unhappy and no one could help me. There was no
cure for brain damage and cerebral palsy but no one wanted to admit that.
It was like the blind leading the blind.
The study I had done at
Auntie Pud’s library gave me the knowledge I needed to know about building
a child’s ego and what would happen to them if that wasn’t done. All the
idiosyncrasies involved were not pretty and we didn’t need that on top of
what we already had.
“Are you okay with driving
to the city everyday for your work?” I asked Rodney.
“Well, it is inconvenient!”
Rodney wasn’t the one to complain though and that was well known.
“What do you think about
moving to the city? They have the children’s hospital with the University
of Oklahoma. Maybe their therapy program will be willing to take Rhonda.
I’m ready to move closer and make a try with that. One of the other
mother’s who was with the program is going since they do not require the
child to be housed with them.”
Rodney and I had been
married now for three years but I didn’t know, of course I didn’t, how he
would feel about giving up our hard won home at Norman, Oklahoma. The work
and sacrifice we made to get us into this spacious, lovely place would be
just thrown away. |
