Being with Lene - I'm Her What?

When talking about Lene’s wheelchair I mentioned that most adults don’t react at all when they see it. Which is true - most people don’t think twice when they actually see Lene driving around in her chair.

That doesn’t mean people don’t react to the two of us in other ways. I had expected one reaction but it didn’t happen much at all. I didn’t even think of the odd reaction we get most often.

I heard a story about being with someone “different” that dealt with the brother of one of my mother’s closest and oldest friends. He had met, fell in love with, and married a Japanese women. A woman from Japan with a rather traditional family. Her family wasn’t that impressed with her relationship with a person who was a foreigner, and of all things, a Canadian. Not impressed at all.

The stories dealt with how he and his wife were dealt with while in Japan - and not just by her family. He was fluent in Japanese - and yet many Japanese seemed to have a mental block that didn’t allow them to accept that he, a foreigner, could speak the language. They would go somewhere and he would ask a person a question in perfect Japanese. The person would answer his wife. This happened all the time. Did they not hear him? Did they just assume that a non-Japanese person can’t speak Japanese? In their minds was he just not worth talking to? Was he less of a person because he wasn’t Japanese?

When Lene and I decided to become a couple we started going out beyond her neighbourhood. We would be seeing people who didn’t see her on a regular basis. I expected the same sort of “he can’t be the one speaking Japanese” type of response just altered a bit.

Imagine the two of us. Lene in her wheelchair and me standing beside her. I half expected that conversations would start with someone talking to me instead of her. I half expected that sometimes when she said or asked something, they would reply to me instead of her.

Amazingly this rarely happens. The first time it did we were out to see an exhibition at Harbourfront in Toronto. The exhibit was outside and it just started to rain when we arrived. We ran into a set of stores to wait until the storm passed. One of them was a women’s clothing store - so in we went to take a look. Lene started puttering around and checking out the clothes. The clerk saw us and came over - and promptly asked me what she was interested in and what size she was.

I was flabbergasted. There was Lene checking out the merchandise while I was standing around doing the “try to pass the time without looking too out of place” dance that a shopper’s partner does. Lene was the one with a purse - and that purse contained the credit cards. Why talk to me? Yet that’s what the clerk did. She came over and talked to me instead of to Lene. Since this was one of the first times we had travelled to someplace new together I saw this as a portent of things to come.

I expected to spend a lot of my life saying “ask her” or “how would I know” or “she was the one who asked you the question”.

I will admit to being slightly surprised how wrong I was. Turns out it hasn’t happened much at all. Quite rarely in fact. I think we can count the egregious cases using the fingers on one hand. That’s over more than a decade. It’s been that rare.

In retrospect I should have known better. I shouldn’t have expected it to be a problem for a number of reasons.

Remember my pictures of Lene in her wheelchair? The ones that are taken from behind because she’s always driving off ahead? Well - that’s not a joke. That’s how things are. She’s more likely to get somewhere and start asking questions before I’ve caught up. People have to look at her as one person and talk to her. Thirty seconds later after I’ve caught up - then they could ignore her and talk to me.

Lene has also learned to get in people’s faces when necessary. To avoid being ignored she takes initiative. She’s the talker. She asks questions. She gets in people’s space and gets their attention. It’s a coping mechanism so she can’t be ignored. She was doing it long before she met me. It’s hard to ignore Lene when she wants to get your attention.

Which is fine by me. People find it hard to get angry or disagree when it’s a person in a wheelchair asking or complaining. I’ve seen many people who are primed to be annoyed at being bothered, even if being annoyed and interrupted is part of their job, who all of a sudden are smiling and on their best behaviour when they realize that it’s a person in a wheelchair who’s doing the interrupting. I’ve got to say I’ve been very impressed with how most people treat Lene and how they treat us.

What I didn’t see coming was the largest blind spot people have when they consider the two of us. It happened first to Lene. It usually happens to Lene.

Lene shops at the St. Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto. An incredible collection of delis, cheese shops, butchers, fish mongers, fruit and vegetable stalls, and bakeries all under one roof. Not a bad place to shop for groceries. When we first met she had been going there for a dozen years or more. Often to the same stalls to buy the same things from the same people. Early on in our relationship we’d go to the market occasionally when I was visiting for the weekend. Not all the time - just once in a while.

One day Lene called me up and had to tell me what happened at the market. She went in to do her regular shopping in the middle of the week and one of the staff she’s been dealing with for years asked her “how her brother was doing?”.

Lene went from thinking “My brother? I don’t have a brother” to “Who is she referring to?” all the way to saying “That’s not my brother - he’s my partner”.

It turns out the biggest blind spots people have about Lene and myself is that they don’t figure we’re in a relationship. That we are partners and, heaven forfend, lovers.

Weirdly, when it occurs, it is usually her being asked about her brother. I think I’ve only been asked about my “sister” once.

It’s quite a blind spot. People will accept her as a person who can talk and communicate and hold her own. That mental leap isn’t as much of a problem as I thought it would be. But in a relationship? Being with someone? And also “being with someone”? Is it just something they hadn’t considered or is it just something they don’t want to picture? I’m not sure.

It doesn’t happen too often - but it does happen.

Overall though I have to say I’m impressed by how we are treated by people in general. They treat the two of us like any other couple most of the time. We are just customers, passengers, pedestrians, or simply random people.

It’s quite nice to end up being treated as just another couple.

Though it is fun to see some people grapple with the fact that we aren’t related - we’re in a relationship. Some people can’t quite handle the thought of it.