Dear Care & Feeding: Please help me infantilize my disabled daughter

[minoanmiss]

(that's the title I gave this one).

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have a 28-year-old daughter who has an autoimmune condition that makes it difficult for her to walk (if she’s having a flare-up). When she’s not having a flare-up, about 50 percent of the time, she can walk unassisted, but the other 50 percent of the time she uses a cane or a wheelchair. She has a very successful life and career in the city we live in, and is able to live independently, but her whole life she’s dreamt of moving to a very large city. She told me she’s planning on moving there at the end of 2021.

I’m extremely nervous because the area where we live has a very low crime rate and most people drive so it’s not like anyone’s out walking alone at night. The city she wants to live in is dangerous, and everyone walks everywhere. She’d be a huge target for crime. She can’t really take self-defense classes because she wouldn’t even be able to go or use the skills she learned half the time. I don’t want her to move. I know it’ll crush her dream, but I think she’s old enough and mature enough to understand that some dreams have to be given up on. She’ll do whatever I advise her. Am I a bad mother for telling her not to move?

—Stay Put

Dear Stay Put,

Time to take a deep breath. I know you’re worried, but this move won’t be happening, if it does, for a year or more. Don’t borrow too much trouble now, and don’t spend the next year trying to talk your daughter out of it. She is an adult, with the right to make her own choices about where she lives and what’s important to her, and you need to recognize and respect that. It’s fine to talk with her about it, listen, even share some of your concerns and/or help her make a good old-fashioned pro-and-con list, but in the end it’s really not for you to tell her which of her dreams are OK and which should be abandoned. (I also think that attempting to do so could backfire. In my experience, few things make someone more determined to do something more than someone telling them they shouldn’t or can’t!)

This move is something your daughter really wants, and it’s not a spur-of-the-moment decision; she has been thinking about it for a long time. Neither her medical condition nor using a cane or wheelchair makes her helpless or unable to live and take care of herself in a city. (And speaking of cities, it’s worth noting that most are not nearly as dangerous as outsiders tend to think—checking the actual crime statistics, if you haven’t, may give you some ease on that point.) I think you need to work on seeing her for the capable, successful, independent adult she is and respect the choices she makes. If she did forgo this move—forgo her dream—because you told her to, I think you’d both wind up regretting it.

—Nicole

Comments

[raine]

Sounds like the mom has tied a huge portion of her own identity in "I have a disabled daughter who needs me 24/7!" when that's not really the case.

[beable]

I gotta say, I feel hella safer walking/wheeling/getting ariund without a car at night in a city where “everyone walks everywhere” than I would in one where people only travel by car.

[rmc28]

I would think a city has a lot more accessible facilities too. (I mean, it's going to have a lot more facilities full stop, that's one of the advantages of city living) and some of them may have thought about accessibility.

-- signed someone who grew up in a rural area and is so glad to be raising kids in a (small) city

[mathemagicalschema]

Yeah, a city where everyone walks everywhere is a city where normal people are going about their business at all hours of the night, which feels drastically safer to me than being alone on the streets. There are people around who might help if something happened.

[jadelennox]

There's studies proving that, even. Busy, well-lit urban streets have less crime than suburban streets, in general. It's called lighted windows something something? Don't remember the details.

[jadelennox]

As a person whose disability prevents me from driving, the only reason I'm independent is that I live in such a city! I couldn't live in a place where people don't unless I were full time dependent on someone to drive me.

[minoanmiss]

Yeah, the pandemic preventing me from using public transit has really underscored this fact for me. But then public transit is one of the reasons I chose this city.

[ashbet]

Yiiiiiikes. LW, *please* separate yourself from your adult daughter’s life choices.

(My daughter is also 28, we both have the same disability, and she’d like to move to Europe to pursue a postgraduate degree and live with her longterm partner, an EU citizen. I have some concerns about accessing specialized healthcare relating to our rare disease, and I will miss her terribly, but I want her to be happy and pursue her dreams, dammit!!)

[harpers_child]

As someone who walks with a cane and will be buying a wheelchair in the next few years, living somewhere with reliable public transportation would really improve my quality of life. Or even living somewhere with mixed shopping and living spaces instead of the suburbs. Shockingly both those things are found in big cities in the US.

[neotoma]

Yeah, I'm not getting how "everyone drives so it's safer" actually jibes with reality. If everyone is walking, there are people around, and it's not like crime is evenly distributed in a city -- there are usually a couple of high-crime neighborhoods, and then a bunch of perfectly safe ones.

[cimorene]

Aside from being wrong though, this is 100% yikes psychologically speaking too.

[naath]

Oh shut up you interfering baggage. And people wonder why I didn't tell my Mum I bought a wheelchair.

[conuly]

If her new city has more pedestrians, then it probably has better sidewalks - which is better for your daughter as a sometimes wheelchair user.

Also, if LW honestly thinks Daughter will "do whatever I advise her" then, yikes, that's even more reason for Daughter to get the hell out of there.

gratuitous Oracle userpic

[jadelennox]

I'm glad Nicole called out the "dangerous city" nonsense, and it's probably for the best that she didn't call it the racist nonsense I am sure Nicole knows it is; in the US pretty much every actually dangerous neighborhood of a city is "the badly redlined bit".

She’ll do whatever I advise her.

I hope you're wrong, LW.

I can't stop thinking about one of the Late Onset Tay Sachs people I knew, who had her heart set on going to Israel and climbing Masada in her wheelchair. Everyone in her family freaked out, but she went -- alone. She died in her thirties, and I think so often about how glad I am that she made it to Masada first.

(Also, fuck you, LW, that woman was a full time wheelchair user with a degenerative cognitive condition, swallowing problems, and difficult-to-understand speech, and she went to a non-English speaking country and climbed a mountain. Fuck you with your infantilizing bullshit.)

Dear LW's daughter:

I'm a physically disabled woman who's been doing martial arts for years. There are countless "self-defense for wheelchair users" classes. Damn straight you can learn self-defense -- including basic urban self-defense which has nothing to do with physical ability. Your mom loves you but this is some munchausen-by-proxy bullshit. Get the fuck out, go to Chicago or wherever, and just make sure you learn which public transit routes have better accessibility (and what neighborhoods have better snow removal) before you sign a lease.

Re: gratuitous Oracle userpic

[minoanmiss]

cheers wildly

Yeah, I had a whole Paragraph about the racist dogwhistle, but decided for once not to rant.

[mommy]

A larger city where people tend to walk is a larger city with better sidewalks which can only be better for the daughter's wheelchair use. On top of that, higher pedestrian counts generally result in better public transit and better accessibility on the whole. I can easily see why the daughter might want or need these things. I wish her well in her move to a community that will hopefully suit her better.

This advice is too gentle for my tastes given the controlling opinions OP is exhibiting. Hopefully it's gentle enough that OP will actually read it.

[minoanmiss]

"this advice is too gentle for my tastes... hopefully it's gentle enough that OP will read it" is exactly what I thought on reading this. ugh, spoon-feeding people.