This is Before:

Now I’d like to introduce my new (and nearly done) bathroom.

There’s some trim and such that needs to be finished, and we’re not properly “moved in” yet. But we’re all very excited with how it turned out.

Then in my senior year of high school I realize I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and college costs money. Lots of money. Then one of my wonderful teachers got me a scholarship (I didn’t think of going for any, because scholarships were like, for basketball players and valedictorians, of which  I was neither.) So after a semester off, where I caught up on some sleep, enough that I felt utterly useless and knew I had to do something, I started at U of L.

Now I loved it. Really, I did. I liked the school environment, meeting new people, and the utter lack of pressure, so that I could actually enjoy learning for learning, not because the world had *expectations* and I’d better damned well live up to them. (By the way, if you haven’t noticed, being a white middle class person doesn’t solve all your problems.) But after three semesters I got a shit teacher who failed me in history 101 because I used the PC term BCE in essay questions and he began the semester with a thirty minute lecture on his Christianity and how he’d be teaching History from a Christian point of view (no matter how hard I studied, no matter how many details I gave or how good my grammar I NEVER got over a 60 on my tests in this class, which is utterly ridiculous seeing as I always got high 8os and 90s on the multiple choice and fill in the blanks parts of the tests. But alas, I didn’t learn about dropping or protesting classes until it was too late.) And I’d finally got the pre-reqs down to get into a creative writing class, where the head of the creative writing program told me I’d be a great writer if I stopped writing genre trash.

So I lost the scholarship (there was only one more semester left anyway on it) and my plan on what I wanted to do with my life. At the least I knew U of L was not for me, and it didn’t make any sense to fight for scholarships, or take out student loans if the only thing I wanted to do I couldn’t go to college for (that would be writing. I know there are colleges that teach and respect genre fiction writing, but they were very far away and I was not ready to completely relocate and incur a ton of college costs as well as live in a city where I knew no one and nothing.)

I decided to do some living and I discovered a few things. Like that it is possible to be a successful and worthy person without graduating college. Like I still want to be a writer, but I’m not entirely sure getting a degree would help me do that. And that college is clearly a big fucking load of bullshit.

To begin with, there’s the bit that was forced down my throat for so long, that I HAD to go to survive after high school. Yeah? And yet no one seems to want to help you find a way to pay for it. Or teach you the tools you need to survive on your own. Or even admit that in the present economy, or hell, any economy, you could take out $40k+ for a basic bachelor’s degree and not have marketable skills. You can (and more and more people ARE) end up flipping burgers of working at Walmart trying to pay off insane student loans.

But the truth remains that there are some jobs you need a certificate or degree for and those jobs tend to be higher paying, comparing base rates. Right now, having been out of the job market for almost 11 years I’ve got crap for marketable skills. So when the youngest started school I had to decide whether to get the job that I could, or go back to school and try to get something to give me an edge.

(By the way I also learned in this time that U of L, which had been a massive–to part time working me–$1400 or so a semester when I went in 1999 is now over $3500 a semester. So I knew the costs, as well as nothing seeming to have changed about their degree offerings, that it was still not for me.)

So I picked school, and I was too late for all the deadlines. Of course. So come January 1st when all the enrollment and application stuff opened up for the Fall 2010 school year I applied. I applied and had my transcripts turned in two weeks into January. I was on the ball. Then in May advising starts, and I’m told to get in fast because the course I’m wanting to get into (phlebotomy) fill up FAST. So first day of advising I’m down there at 8:30am (when I want to get something done I’m pretty driven.) Three hours later the advisor sees me, enrolls me and tells me:

“Oh, there is no financial aid for that program.”

Um, huh. So, why isn’t this mentioned on the program’s page on the college website? And why when I put in that I’d be going to school for less than two years didn’t the FASFA website tell me RIGHT AWAY that I wasn’t going to qualify for aid. Why when I had all my shit together and was totally serious about this, why did no one mention any of this?

So then I was faced with a choice; pay for my classes out of pocket (because we can all afford to do that, right?) or enroll in at least a 2 year degree program. Way back when I went to college the first time two years was nothing. But now…I’m not stupid. I see all the people who are having their scholarships and aid dropped for no reason other than the government can’t or won’t pay for it. Just last night there was a story about a woman who went to school to become a teacher, the state agreed to forgive her entire costs if she taught at a low income school for a certain number of years. She did, thinking it was fair, and then the state said it didn’t have the money to forgive the loan so she had to pay it all back with interest. They sent her to collections which harassed her, even threatening her with the loss of her teaching license and calling her AT SCHOOL to harass her.

Right now my family is keeping its head above water, but if something like that happened, if the school decided to renege on aid we’d be royally screwed. And what if I went for a year, then didn’t qualify for aid anymore? What use is half a degree?

Plus with most of my basics out of the way there’s a chance I won’t get aid because I wouldn’t be in school for a full two years. That’s right, I might not get financial aid because I’ve already been to school.

As it stands right now I have everything turned in. I’m enrolled, but I can’t pay. What’s worse is I can’t drop the class either, without going back downtown (and I’d have to take the kids with me this time, because school is out) because someone in the administration hasn’t put my ACT scores into the system (I turned them in my hand to the administrator’s hand) and the system claims I have to take the Compass test (which the administration said I didn’t have to take because I’ve already passed multiple college level math and English courses).

College is in a horrible state in America today. We’re told, by high schools and employers, that we have to have it, no matter what, so people are taking huge, bad risks with money and loans to pay for it. Then when they’re out with that shiny new degree they find there is no job waiting for them, just people who want to be paid back. More and more college is only for the rich, and it almost seems as if the advisors and administration of colleges are purposefully hiding things, or omitting them to continue to keep enrollment high. At the cost of what? The average person. In 1999 there was no way I could work full time and go to school full time. The per semester price of $1400 seemed like grabbing for stars. It was impossible then, now… now at more than $3500 a semester before books, housing and things like mandatory parking passes and U of L has a mandatory $500 food card fee. ALL students are required to spend $500 on a card just for the on campus restaurants. The costs and fees of college are astronomical, and prohibitive for most people these days.

Between the jacking up of tuition and tacking on of fees and the pressure to go to college no matter what the cost college has become little more than another way for us to be fleeced. Despite the ridiculousness I’m still planning on going back. But rather than letting myself be dragged into big dreams and “You need to make something of yourself”s I’m taking part of a tax return and going just through the certificate program I want.

I loved college, and I missed it. But I can’t afford to live that lifestyle at the cost of my family, my finances and the trouble college brings. Which is a shame. Getting an education should never be a bad thing.

So here’s what happened to us today. We have been visiting the YMCA twice a week for open swim. The kids are doing very well, are becoming very comfortable with the water, and furthermore with the pool rules and locker room rules. In fact, both kids are really enjoying swim time not just as exercise and recreation, but as social time as well. If there aren’t other kids to play with they will play games with each other.We’ve been having lots of fun, and the kids have been making single serving friends, or at the very least been learning how to deal with other kids/people in this situation, which for ASD kids is a BIG deal.

Today super lifeguard (who was pacing the edge of the pool, getting onto everyone for everything, to the point of waving a laminated copy of the pool rules in people’s faces) was in residence. (There were issues with bigger kids splashing and practically jumping in on people too, but…) While I was hanging up my purse on the wall my kids went a head and got into the pool. They’re comfortable with it, the stairs are all of three feet away from where I leave my purse and it takes me all of ten seconds to hang up the purse and be right behind them. Super Lifeguard yelled at them, and me, telling me I have to be in the pool with them. Well duh. I’m in a bathing suit, with goggles and dive rings on my arm, right behind the kids. But apparently I have to be in the pool first.

Then a few minutes later my daughter wanted me to race her swimming. So we do laps short ways across the pool and when I turn for a lap back I see the lifeguard scolding my son and removing him from the pool. There’s never been a problem with his behavior in the pool, other than the occasional jog, so I’m wondering what the hell. The lifeguard tells me my son was stealing toys from another kid (a rubber ducky that my son had been playing with when I moved all of three feet away to do laps with my daughter). The thing is there were three duckies, so both kids could have had one without any of them “being taken away”. The lifeguard then said that my son was squirting the other child and the parent complained. (Almost immediately after this incident, by the way, the parent in question had a very friendly conversation with me. Nothing significant was said, but it was absolutely friendly, no sign of this parent being upset at all.) So my son was removed from the pool and put in “time out” and threatened with getting kicked out altogether because he squirted another kid…in a swimming pool. (With several thirteen year olds nearby having a “who can splash the biggest” contest” about five feet away.)

I tell the lifeguard that my son is autistic so he doesn’t understand all the social rules like other people. My mouth is open to explain to him that things need to be explained in a way he understands when the lifeguard tells me that if my son is autistic then he needs to be at my side the whole time period. And he goes on to say that the pool is very busy and if it’s too much for my son we can go into a swim lane (which are all of three feet wide) to swim away from the other kids.

Now let me tell you something, Autistic does NOT mean incompetent. There are issues like sensory issues, OCD and yes, mental retardation are co-morbid (that refers to disorders that commonly occur together, I like it, so I use it a lot) but every mental issue, from depression to OCD and PSTD and autism is a RANGE of issues. If a child is Autistic it doesn’t immediately mean they are are stupid, or incapable. It means they have communication problems.

My son is perfectly capable of functioning normal, with a bit of aid, and the #1 thing he needs is help with communicating. You cannot pull him out of a pool and start chiding him and be vague about it. “You can’t do that” means nothing, but “You can’t squirt people” does mean something. Specific statements are easier to understand.

We almost went to complain right there, but the lifeguard backed off and as it turned out my son had been trying to play with the other little boy. They were playing with the ducks together and yes, my son squirted the other boy. Initiating social play is a huge deal to ASD kids, and in a way they make themselves very vulnerable when doing so. This is the time when they are most likely to be rejected by other kids for being weird or different. ASD kids do communicate, and therefore interact, differently, so yeah, it can come off as weird if you don’t see that they are simply trying to reach out to you. (My son for example, will sometimes go up to people and monologue a story. He’s trying to get attention and interact, and he doesn’t really know how to converse, so he monologues.)

So here’s what was done:

Boy plays with other boy by squirting him with a rubber ducky in a pool. Lifeguard jumps in, scolds older boy in vague language about the boy being wrong and misbehaving, makes him get out of the pool and sit in time out, then spends five minutes arguing with his mom about the boy’s behavior, ending with telling both that the child should stay right at his mother’s side.

What should have been done:

Lifeguard sees older boy squirting younger boy in a swimming pool with a rubber ducky. If the younger boy or parents were upset or complained the lifeguard should have gone to the child and said “He doesn’t want to play like that.”

That’s it. Or “Please don’t squirt the other kids.”

So how do you tell if you’re dealing with a special needs kid? Does it matter? Is it really that hard to be specific when correcting a child? Furthermore, if the child’s parent is right there, isn’t easier to just tell them if there’s a problem and let them parent their own child?

But instead pulling my son out of the pool and lecturing him about how wrong he was without him understanding exactly what it is that he did wrong (he thought he was being scolded for trying to play with the other child) led to twenty minutes of my son crying to me that he himself was a jerk and a horrible person and he had to leave the pool because the other kids didn’t like him. And the lifeguard’s instant assumption that autistic=incapable led to me leaving a rather angry message with the aquatics director.

I don’t like to be a bitch, but my son has every right to be in that pool, to play without me hovering over him at arms length. My daughter deserves to get to lap race with me, even if her brother doesn’t want to. I should not have to fight for these things for them, especially since no one was in any danger (my son is chest arms and head over the water in the shallow end and the other child was being held my his mother with a floaty strapped to his back).  If he had talked to me everything would have been fine and there would have been no issue at all. Not even a reason to point out to the whole pool that my son is not like the rest of them.

So if you find yourself in a situation like this there are the things to do:

1. Leave it to the parent to parent.

2. Make sure you are communicating clearly and efficiently. All kids people deserve it, special needs or not, and clear communication diffuses all kinds of situations and resolves all kinds of issues, usually harmlessly. All it takes is a little effort.

3. Don’t assume that a disability makes someone incompetent, stupid or incapable. It’s insulting, belittling and infuriating. If you don;t know what to do when someone says “My son is autistic” there is nothing wrong with asking “Then how do I help” or “then what do you suggest”.

Bonus points: No one responds well if you start a conversation by telling them they’re bad and threatening them.

Have a little consideration, and keep in mind that not everyone is like you. That’s all it takes.

Portland, though, after it was absorbed into Louisville (which very nearly had to suffer Portland as a twin city rather as a subservient one) became a dumping ground. First the Irish immigrants made Portland their home (in fact St. Xavier, one of our most attention-getting schools in Louisville started in Portland, a fact that they refuse to even admit in their own history.) then in the 30s two floods pushed the middle class out of Portland and the city largely declined any efforts to rebuild (a trend that sadly continues to this day.)

Portland has a very noble background, one that even looks inclusive, since we were home to the first female steam ship captain and we were the first neighborhood in Louisville to home blacks in the 60s.

Since then West Louisville has become the “black part of Louisville” and in a way has been gifted with some loud and persistent activists, downtown has undergone, and is undergoing a revitalization program and Portland…has been forgotten. The thing is, even our own representative on the city council has reportedly told people she doesn’t need Portland to get re-elected so she doesn’t care about us. Portland wrongly, might I add, has a tough reputation that crime statistics do not support. Essentially, today, we aren’t rich and white enough to be important to the city leaders and we aren’t minority enough to be important to their PR machine.

The support systems in my area leans against the further education or job training, or job procurement of people in this area. This is where the poor people of Louisville are sifted by the rest of the areas who will not tolerate them.

This is also the only place in my teen and adult life that I have ever felt like home.

I moved every year from 1989 to 1996, when my family finally settled into the house my father would eventually buy. I’ve lived in Indiana, Georgia and several sections of Louisville (Newburg, Hikes Point, Saint Matthews, Highlands). Sure I don’t have the full adult view of all these places, their politics and community, but I’ve been a part of a lot of places and Portland still feels like home. My writing career, and attempts to both find writing communities in Louisville, and venues for promotion have taken me to all the “typical” hang outs; coffee bars where clerks sneered at me in disgust when I asked to put up flyers for an event, bookstores who told people the event had been canceled while we were setting up, and east end writers groups who strongly discouraged me from joining. The real world home I’ve found has been a Taco Bell in a predominately black neighborhood on the edge of Portland where people smile at me instead of sneer, don’t charge eight bucks for a drink, or try to force their vegan and extreme green politics on me, and don’t complain if I sit and work for a few hours, taking up their precious dining room space.

And likewise the only place I’ve found where the neighbors will stop and talk with you, offer a hatchet or a hand, out of friendliness and helpfulness instead of Thanking-God-you’re-finally-doing-something-about-that-damn-eyesore has been Portland.

Recently I’ve gotten involved with the Portland Festival planning group. The festival itself is 36 years old and proceeds benefit community charities. All of them, not the proceeds after the people in charge get paid. The people behind the Festival are amazing, good people. They dedicate a lot of their free time into putting it together but more than that all of them are directly invested in the community. They know the business people here, they’re involved in other initiatives, like local anti-drug groups, and in interacting with the city on behalf of the community. They invest their time and money here, many of them being property owners, often owning multiple properties. They have a lot of loyalty to the area and I’ll be honest, I haven’t really encountered many people like that.

Two really upsetting things have happened lately that provoked this post. 1) Our house, which is a 4 bedroom 2 bath, 1600 square foot two floor, 100 year old home (completely renovated at some point in the 80s and mostly kept up with the exception of a few things that largely happened when the bank that owned it left it closed up and unmaintained for 9 months before we bought it, and normal things, like the siding and roof aging) on about a quarter of an acre with a private driveway and a detached two car garage, was valued at just over $6k when we went to our bank for a refinancing. The surveyor cited “the neighborhood” and “the age of the home” as the primary reason for this assessment, essentially saying that because we live in Portland and our house isn’t one of those brand new (lifeless) communities being built all the time, our house was useless. (Remember I mentioned those two floods in the 30 that devastated the neighborhood? Our house survived both of them with no major damage. Who knows what else it’s survived. I’m sure it’ll outlast us.) The bigger rub is we know for a fact what a farce this “assessment” is because two years ago our next door neighbors bought their house (which is almost half our size, a traditional Portland “shotgun”) for $56k, from a relative.

Second is a friendly sort of person (not a close friend, but a friendly acquaintance) who on Facebook has spent a lot of updates talking really bad about the neighborhood. You know, “Only pill poppers, drunks and hookers live there”, “I am so glad I got the hell out”, “The area isn’t like I remember it”, “It’s not safe to walk around there alone anymore”.

The thing that bugs me about that are threefold. 1) I can’t really talk about it because it involves my personal knowledge of the person saying these things, which include but aren’t limited to all the ways this person has not, themselves, contributed to the community in a positive, but sometimes in a very negative, way. 2) I have been spending a lot of my free time trying to help out the community, a community I’ve only lived in for about ten years, and it bugs me, and I feel cheapness my effort to have someone actually born and raised here belittling the time, effort and money I’ve put into the community. Portland Festival aside, I chose (even sought out) to buy a home here, because I liked the characters of the homes here and the sense of community. I’ve put a lot of money and time into my home, my yard, my kid’s schools, and yes, even community politics on behalf of people who don’t have my education, intellect, skill or just time, to give. Likewise others seem only willing to contribute complaints, even into insults. It’s frustrating, and I certainly have more ways to spend my time rather than let the community I’m trying to help spit on my face.

The last thing that bugs me is the idea that something as static as a cluster of buildings and streets have changed so much in such a short time. I was warned, when I started dating my husband that he came from Portland, which was the trash section of town. Dangerous, some said. What utter tripe. Most people here have never been involved in a violent, or non violent crime. I hear about more murders and violence in Bonnieville, a tiny town south of Elizabethtown, where my mother-in-law lives than I have in Portland. I’ve heard of more break ins and car thefts from people I know who live in the Highlands and Old Louisville sections of town, than I have from people who live in Portland. I’ve always felt safe enough in this neighborhood to walk to the store, or the bus stop, the doctor’s office or the vet (because hey, bonus, I can walk to all those places from my house, as well as to the hardware store, and some fast food places too.) I’ve walked through alleys and *gasp* past black people who do little more than nod as we pass each other.

The idea that this neighborhood has somehow changed, and become unsafe is ridiculous, because it is still as safe as any other area occupied by lots of people. The idea that in a person’s childhood it was somehow safer, well first of all there was a great episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit that I saw that addressed this issue. Nostalgia skews a person’s memories of the past. No era of the past was without its dangers, its crazies and its drama. There is no real Donna Reed, or Brady Bunch, not even in the 50s or 70s. The past most people are nostalgic for never, ever existed except in dreams, ideals and fantasies.

In fact dwelling too much in those times, wanting too much for those things to be a reality is utterly dangerous. And seeing as the situation everyone OTHER than the white male was in those times it’s outright disastrous. In fact a longing for the fantasy world where women wear pearls to bake and vacuum, men are always well paid and handsome, kids behave and minorities and gays and lesbians didn’t exist, save for maybe as comic relief, or proof of sin, is longing for something you have no right to have, the ability to force your will on everyone else in the world.

The world is a mess, chaotic place. It is microcosms, cracks in the facade and the snobbish look on the face of people who you’ll never be good enough for, and in fact, even the person they see in the mirror isn’t good enough for. The truth is that it’s very likely these people berating my neighborhood just don’t like the color it’s becoming. They don’t like how they felt living here, sifted to the bottom and forgotten. They need, for some reason to tell the world how much better off they are, not through hard work that very few people every see, the kind of work, that when done right blends in to a seamless, effortless appearance of things being as they should be, but by screaming that By God they are better off because they aren’t THAT person (anymore).

But in the end good riddance to those with no sense of community or tolerance. They can take their pride, and their attitude elsewhere, for other people to be bothered with. Me, I have a garden to work on, a hundred year old house, that thanks to someone who hasn’t forgotten about those of us struggling out here, has new windows and a new roof, and is looking awfully spiffy. I have a meeting Monday, where I’ll get to work with other people like me, who aren’t asking for praise or payment, but for people to just contribute something other than apathy to the things and the people around them. And despite all the naysayers, and the fear mongers and elites over on the other end of town, I have friends here, and a sense of community here. I have a house I love, and a place to call home, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

Then you collapse into bed at night and you realize that despite everything you have a clean house, healthy happy children, a well rested husband and you’ve just spent the day with a good friend. And you realized crisis or not, you enjoyed the hell out it.

Sweet dreams and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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