I Wish It Could Have Been Otherwise By Karen Peralta

This was written for an academic journal about people with disabilities and what that means concerning their parent-child relationships.

As far back as I can remember, I have been hearing voices.  It started when I was just three months old. I remember lying on my back in a cold sweat, undergoing nicotine withdrawal (as I found out decades later), my smoking mother having switched from breast-feeding to bottled formula.  Gasping for breath, I heard my father yelling at my sister in the next room.  She was wetting the bed every night, and my father was extremely upset.  I couldn't understand at all, and was preparing to scream aloud.

Suddenly a voice went off in my head, saying "If you scream, something very bad will happen to you."  Since I was only a baby, it wasn't in words, but I could hear the voice.  I screamed anyway, and my mother came in, swooping me out of the crib into her loving arms.  I heard my father's yelling increase, and the sounds of my sister being spanked.  It was so awful I can recall it even now, though I know that seems utterly impossible.

I grew up clumsy, anti-social, unable to communicate well.  And the voices continued.  I was watching TV once, "The Green Hornet" show, and I felt something spit very hard between my legs, going straight up my private parts.  It was horrible.  But I never told my parents about any of these things, keeping it all quietly to myself as the other kids taunted me, making fun of how weird and unusual I was, unable to keep up with them except in my schoolwork. There, I excelled.  But for many years I spoke to no one, crying to myself even in the classroom, my body twisting up into awkward shapes uncontrollably.  My mother noticed this, but we never saw a doctor about it. Instead, she sought out psychological counseling for me when I entered my teens.  This did me no real good.

One day, a nice lady coach who had seen me jogging around the high school track asked me to join the girl's track team.  I did, and this began a partial recovery from my disabilities and social awkwardness. I made friends, and even came in second in one of our races.  By the time I entered college I was pretty much normal, though often subject to strange feelings and occurrences, and occasional voices in my head.

But still disturbed and given to crying fits, I dropped out of college, taking off hitch-hiking to blindly find my own haphazard way of living.  I ended up in Washington State, where I found work as an attendant for the disabled.  I met John Tyler, a most amazing man with polio who taught me that disability is not the end of your life, but the beginning, and I made friends with other disabled people.

For the first time in my life, I was happy; I blossomed with joy, no longer alone and afraid. I even married the most wonderful man in the world, Ron Schwarz, the son of Austrian Jews who had fled Hitler's Holocaust; he had severe multiple sclerosis and used an electric wheelchair.  We could not consummate our marriage, but we were deeply in love just the same. 

We all lived happily at Center Park, the first major apartment building in the country built specifically for people in wheelchairs and for all kinds of disabled people to abide within its beautiful walls independently. I met every sort of disabled person imaginable, including the deaf/blind, learning all about the various disabilities.  But my sweet husband Ron finally died of cancer in February of 1985, two short months after my dearest friend John Tyler, my mentor and savior, unhappily succumbed to pneumonia. More