Reflections from this weekend

For the past few years, I/we (hubby and I) have been donating towards a scholarship fund at one of my alma maters. I used to have a career in healthcare when I first met my now spouse, and hubby suggested that we create a fund for other women in my field. I looked at the extensive list of scholarships and bursaries for this school and opted to contribute towards one in existence. Due to the circus that is my family, hubby and I weren’t sure that we could commit to a specific amount of money per year and this gave us the flexibility to donate as we were able.

Due to having to advocate for my twins, I have given thought to my own journey with my hearing loss and what advocacy I or my mother had to do. In hindsight, there was very little advocacy needed in my school journey in regards to accessibility. My mother told me that it was actually my grade 1 teacher, Ms. Smith, who advocated to the school that I didn’t need to be in remedial or special ed class – that I was a bright girl who just didn’t hear or speak well. My mother told me this when I was in university as I was reviewing my old school memorabilia and kept seeing “will be going into a NORMAL class” in the next grade. I was perplexed about why that wording was used. I also remember that there were a few cases that my parents had to explain to teachers in my junior high years about what my hearing loss really meant, and thus I ended up being moved in the seating arrangements from alphabetical to visible line of sight (for lip reading).

So last year, I asked the bursary/scholarship office about a disability scholarship that was in the list and its history. It was started by an alumni who is physically disabled. I spoke with this person to ask if they would be open to my adding our funding to this instead of the “women” one. I was told that the terms of the fund were due to be renewed (as it was for a fixed period that was lapsing). I told the scholarship office about this conversation and left it with them to sort out. Totally forgot about this conversation until an email thread this morning.

The conversation is to explore creating a new one and renaming it the “X and Y Accessibility fund.” Upon seeing my surname as the Y, I physically shuddered and replied that “my initial thought is that we don’t need our name on this fund.  It could simply be call “Accessibility Scholarship”.  I grew up with a father who gave away a lot of money but he did not broadcast this fact.  I don’t really know that I am comfortable with our name on it, but I will see what hubby thinks”.

I asked hubby and he agreed. We don’t need our names on anything. I’m not sure that hubby has the same reasoning as I do. I grew up with a heritage of faith and service. While I didn’t grow up in the Mennonite faith, my parents are both Displaced Persons due to their Mennonite faith. It was not openly discussed but there were certain things that we understood in our family. I suppose they are called the “Family Rules” that every family has. They vary, of course, from family to family based on their values and beliefs. I grew up with a strong connection to church. It felt like we were at church even when it wasn’t Sunday. Both of my parents held positions of service in whatever church we were in but in some cases, we were not members for various technical reasons.

The “rules” that I grew up with were:

1. Do a good a job at whatever you commit to. Don’t commit if you aren’t going to do it.
2. Don’t quit just because you don’t like something.
3. Don’t drink, do drugs, have premarital sex. (“Don’t be like your friend so and so” was often said to me when I was in high school.)
4. Don’t tell people about your money.
5. Don’t buy something on credit card unless you have the money to pay for it. ALWAYS pay the bottom line of the credit card, not down payments.
6. Don’t go into debt if you don’t have to.

So to that end, I never had a student loan (it was the parent loan), worked for my living, paid the credit cards in full, etc. Mission was an important aspect for my father. He was often donating to something, The Shantymen’s Ministries, missionaries, Alumni things, the list goes on.

On a rare visit back East to see my family, I mentioned to my mother that we still didn’t have our tax refund yet (it was August) because we were being audited. We had never been audited before but it was our first year to claim the DTC for our children, so it was an obvious irregularity in our finances. My mother’s reply was “oh yes, your father got audited too.” I was shocked. She said that because he donated 80% of his funds to charity, they got audited for 6 years in a row, but after a while they (Revenue Canada) realized that this was just what Dad did and stopped after that.

My father did not broadcast what he donated or to whom. He was not one for titles. So even though he had a PhD, he did not insist on the title “Dr.” I actually didn’t realize that he had a PhD until I was in high school. “Yes. ” my mother replied. “Why do you think we ask for Dr. Y when we call his office?”

My last comment on this blog is about my learning to advocate for accessibility. Last night, hubby and I had a rare date night with dinner and a movie. While in the restaurant, my conversation went back to my “struggle” with my hearing loss. I said “while I know in my head that others struggle with hearing certain things, I also thought that it was my fault when I couldn’t hear things well. And it reminds me of a twitter post or something that I read earlier in the week. It was something along the lines of “able bodied persons making the disabled feel that they have to acclimate to the standards of society, but in reality it should be that society accommodates me and my disability”. I told hubby that I never thought of it that way before because I have had to survive/navigate the world with this hearing loss and it was just a given that I wasn’t going to function as well as I could, but I made do. Having to learn how to be a “tiger mama” and fight for my kids and what they are entitled to has been tough for me as I don’t want to burn a bridge or potential ally, but I think that lately a lot of advocates are just tired of being pushed aside and are raising their voices so that we are loud and in the end, the powers that be, society, whoever, will have to listen.

Ok. I need to go do something else for a while like chores and then back to genealogy stuff. 😉