but what does it mean?

I would first like to set the record straight by announcing, much to the amusement of at least two of you, that I have never slapped any one or thing for any reason, though I imagine it's never too late. And as Joey so famously said, "It only takes one arm..."

More importantly, my lovely and dear Boo, friend and former roommate, is shortly moving thousands of miles from me to the Northeast, where her equally lovely husband is going to school. This is a much lamented event in my life. So much so, that I was forced to drink two beers and a glass of wine just to make it through our last evening together, at some point in the duration of which I may or may not have been sitting on her lap. 

And so, in respectful salute to this separation, I here publish a magazine clipping that Boo cut out once upon a time when she was scrap-booking our six months of living together.

I can tell you from experience that if someone scrapbooks time spent with you, then gives the scrapbook filled with memorable journal entries and funny clippings to you as a gift, it is love indeed. But when I saw this clipping, I knew beyond a doubt that Boo and I will forever be soulmates (is that redundant?)

But what does it mean? I've been entranced and disturbed and curious for several weeks now, pondering the significance of the above. Admittedly, I have some far-fetched ideas about things, but I feel as though I could spend the next six months just staring at this, pondering its wacky significance. But I don't have that kind of time...So I ask you, dear peruser of this ridiculous blog, what does it mean?

Or should I say, what does it mean to you? ;)

OneArmGirl 

Don't know about your local, but here in the dry, fire-ridden Southwest, hopes for fireworks are a bit hampered this year. So as I sit indoors, encased in air-conditioning, I would like to wish you a very happy 4th of July. Or for you non-Americans, just another day. Wherever your day takes you, may it be filled with merriment and plenty of shade.  As mentioned above, I will not be going anywhere without air-conditioning.

But if you have a moment between your coffee and a piña colada, I would like to ask a question. What do you want to know about OneArmGirl? I do my best to offer a well-rounded view of life here at OAG, but living here, it's hard to know what I've left out. Are there holes in my story? Have I mentioned something that you want 'fleshed out' as we writers say.

This is wide open, folks. Feel free to ask anything that tempts your curiosity, from 'How do you feel about online dating?' to 'Have you ever actually slapped someone with your little arm?' I may not, of course, answer all your questions here on the blog, but I need your help. Please help me.

Send all inquiries to OneArmGirl@gmail.com. Let's juice it up!

OneArmGirl   

the others

Growing up one-armed can be a very lonely experience. But this never occurred to me until I was well into adulthood. As a child, I was surrounded by two-handed people doing everything the two-handed way. So I kind of forgot that I was different––like the little chick that starts to bark, thinking the family dog is its mother. 

Meeting another girl––or boy––with only one arm was very rare. I can only think of a handful of occasions. There was a guy in my class at college with a deformity leaving him minus one forearm and hand. But we weren't friends. It was almost like we avoided each other on purpose because it was too weird. The sum total of our communication in four years amounted to a brief greeting one afternoon when he rolled by me on his skateboard. I don't even remember his name. I do remember he was the lead singer in a punk band, and I'm not really into punk.

I'm actually pretty shy when I see people "like" me in public. I feel awkward, wondering if I should talk to them or pretend I don't notice. Most often, I sidle away, feeling like one of us broke an unspoken rule about not turning up at the same place at the same time––someone didn't get the memo, there's been a glitch in the matrix.

But meeting other handicapped people was not high on my agenda for the first twenty-five years of my life. I mostly did everything I could to forget what made me different. I preferred to blend in with the crowd, and when everyone around you has two arms, it's easy to forget you don't.

Allies

But two's company, and when I met Rick, I realized how alone I really felt. Rick lost his left arm to cancer when he was a kid. I met him on a hot summer day at a vaulting clinic. He told me to stand on top of a horse, so I did. The connection was instant. We exchanged notes on one-arm living. He taught me to hold a horse hoof between my legs. Allied in a world of two-armed people, we relished the company. When I'm with Rick, I feel special and average at the same time.

Only several years after college did I start to develop an interest in other people with similar handicaps. It started slow, but now it's verging on an obsession. Turns out I'm in good company. It seems the more I think about it, the more people similar to me I run into...

I recently saw a woman with atrophied hands at a coffee shop. She was sitting with friends, using her nose to navigate a touch screen phone (I can't even do that with my fingers).

Last week, I found myself in a grocery store with two other patrons that appeared to be amputees. It was like a convention that no one had signed up for. I wondered if other people in the store were concerned that it might be contagious.

The one-arm way

At a billiard bar last night with Little Gen and Asif, there was a guy with a stub leg playing pool. Personally, I think he had an unfair advantage, sitting nearly level with the table in his wheelchair. I caught his eye when I walked by and we looked at each other in a moment of recognition, much like bikers hold out a couple fingers when they pass each other on the highway.

This week I received an email from the beautiful and vivacious Pam, one-armed woman and sister blogger at Unarmed...just the way I am. This reminds me that I've never had a girlfriend with one arm or any other missing appendages. Exploring her blog this morning, I find we have a lot of similar interests and I'm suddenly gripped with a strong desire to talk to her about everything she's ever thought, over a glass of merlot, preferably in a rainstorm, on a screened-in porch.

In Poster Child, Emily Rapp's memoir about growing up with a prosthetic leg, her mother explains to her teachers that Emily is not to be called 'disabled,' that she is no different from anyone else. This seems correct, but also sounds a little like rearing children to be "just another brick in the wall."

And I've never been a huge fan of bricks.

OneArmGirl

one-arm bowling

About a month ago, my friend Heidi asked me to join her bowling team to raise money for developmentally disabled adults. I said yes. Though I'd prefer eating calf nuts to fundraising, I sent out a plea to friends and family to support a poor and very pathetic one-arm bowler. It worked. Then, a few days before the game, I got sick, and on the day of, I was in bed with barely enough energy to pick up a glass of water. Bowling was out of the question.

But if I've learned one thing about working with handicaps, it requires constant reevaluation and revision to the plan. So, this past Sunday, I had my own homemade bowl-a-thon with Little Gen and Asif (Little Gen's boyfriend who is staying with us). Asif is from India and only learned to bowl about a month ago, but he is already better than both Little Gen and I. He also cooks us a lot of curry.

Around 9 o'clock we headed over to Holiday Bowl where a helpful young attendant insisted on finding me the perfect bowling ball. "Here ya go, Mami," he said handing me a luscious red nine-pounder, "this is the one I use myself." I have definitely never been called 'mami' before. According to Urban Dictionary, this means I am a sexy Latina, though it occurs to me that I may also be old enough to be his mami.

We sailed through four games, though most of the pictures we took indicate that we did everything but bowl.

I played a bit above my average 70, but kept with my usual one strike and a couple gutter balls per game. Asif, of course, was winning every game. But I pulled ahead and miraculously won the last game. Either I got better the more beer I drank, or my opponents got worse––either seems equally plausible to me. And speaking of that, can you really call something during which you drink alcohol a 'sport'? I have my doubts. Ironically, it occurs to me now that the longer we played, the more developmentally disabled we became.

A family started bowling in the lane next to ours with one miniature bowler. It took everything she had to merely lift her bowling ball in her small arms. But when little Susie Q noticed Finneas, her interest in the game noticeably diminished. She was captivated, entranced. Both parents apologized for her curiosity, which I assured them was perfectly acceptable, and encouraged it with some tiny waves in her direction. She didn't take up my offer to give Finneas a pat, but did afford me a couple shy smiles. I'm glad Finneas got in on the action––I think he was feeling a little left out, riding along while my larger, more competent bowling arm got to play. 

I'm OK at bowling. I think with a little practice, I could be really good. It's one sport where it's not such a big deal if you have only one arm. Problem is, I'm just not a huge fan. Maybe it's the fluorescent lighting or the arcade-like environment; it just doesn't really do it for me.

But you know what does do it for me? Lizards with stub legs. A bearded dragon called 'Stubilina,' to be exact.

'Stubby' for short

Obviously, she was born to be a star. Heidi and her husband adopted Stubilina when her former owner could no longer care for her. Pete tells me these lizards are often missing legs due to their unfortunate habit of biting them off each other in adolescence.

I wonder if Stubilina likes to bowl.


OneArmGirl


And now, we make OneArmGirl history with our very first ever video. Enjoy!

   

broken hallelujahs

I am delighted to announce that for this week's post we welcome guest blogger Mañana Mama, who also happens to be my friend Rachel from childhood. Shortly after OneArmGirl was launched last year, Rachel started blogging her adventures in motherhood, and has since far surpassed OAG in her following. I am addicted to her wit and playful word use. And she makes me believe I, too, could be a mom. That we both grew up in the same high desert neighborhood, studied the same subject in college, and later both worked in print media before pursuing more personal projects, causes one to wonder if there wasn't something in the water––if there'd been any water in the high desert, that is. As evidenced by our play in dry river beds, there wasn't much.

You'll notice it doesn't sound like MM and I grew up a mere 1/4 mile apart. Some years back, she was kidnapped by the British, brainwashed, and forced to speak 'proper' English––an obvious act of retaliation on a former colony for having 'butchered' their native tongue. Yes, we did it on purpose just to piss you off...er, take the piss out of you?

OneArmGirl  

Crooked Arroyos

Like most lapsed Lutherans, I spend far too much time eating soup and mulling over regrets. One of my regrets is that I didn't arm myself better for the steep, treacherous descent into motherhood by asking OneArmGirl a few more questions. I'll explain.

Mom without arms

Just like my favourite English Major, OAG and I grew up in a sort of Arroyo Wobagon, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average. There were arroyos anyway.

OAG and I met at the age of six, when her family arrived on the juniper block, and our moms bumped into each other one day while checking their mailboxes. In Arroyo Wobagon, your mailbox is a half-mile drive from your house via a bumpy dirt road. Exciting things and chance meetings happen at the mailbox hub – like one time, a postcard got nicked for instance. Our moms got to chatting, realized they had similarly-aged daughters, and the rest is obscurity.

Growing up, we spent a gazillion golden afternoons playing in arroyo dirt. There wasn't much else to do. OAG taught me about being Pennsylvania Dutch. My early research suggested that it was mostly to do with butter and jam, fried in butter. I taught her about being a granola hippy, or the bits of the trade that I knew and could be bothered to get out of the hammock to demonstrate.

Trick-or-treating featured prominently on the Arroyo Wobagon social calendar. During the rest of the year we imagined we were pioneers and cowered from the Baskerville-like hound that stalked the road between our houses. Deep in daydreams, we played round upon round of a memory card game called 'Authors'. When that got old we took entrepreneurial inspiration from OAG's dad and collected old bricks out of the arroyo for a buck each. In the end, everything returned to the arroyo.

Wobagon road

As you might imagine, OAG was always a pretty sharp tack, and she was also unusually conscientious for a kid (remember, 'kid' is the personality type featured prominently in Lord of the Flies). She once begged me to forgive her for accidentally tipping over my plastic horse and breaking off one of his hooves at the shin.

OAG may have forgotten to mention that, when not occupied with arroyo dirt, she spent her youth winning short story contests. And there was that one time when she put on a silly black cape and casually gave the class valedictorian speech. Due to modesty or shame, she has also failed thus far to blog about the neighborhood newspaper that we jointly published – twice - on a printing press of A4 paper and crayola markers. It was every bit as naff as you'd imagine, but we were too innocent to realize it - our dreams hadn't yet been whittled down to dust by the grown-up world.

Occupied arms

After high school OAG went east and I went west. After a few years we traded and she went west and I went east. My itchy feet took me to London by way of the Inland Empire (where the sun always sets), and through a series of unlikely events, this became my home. As so many have before me, I decided that living in London was pretty spiffy, then promptly had children and was economically exiled from both spiffiness and London.

But just before I became a mother, when I still lived in a grown-up neighborhood and had free time, OAG asked me to take a picture and send it to her. She wanted a photo of a beautiful, naked, heavily pregnant woman atop a plinth in Trafalgar Square – a statue by a sculptor called Marc Quinn whose chosen subject, Alison Lapper, was born with a different set of limbs to most people due to a condition called phocomelia.

Of course, my picture didn't do the statue justice. And as I snapped it, a thought flickered across my mind that I had been a slightly oblivious childhood friend. This gut feeling reasserted itself when I read Joey's Theory, not for the reasons outlined in the theory, but more to do with familiarity - I'd just always known OAG, and she seemed perfectly complete to me the way she was. So as a kid, I never thought much about her limbs.

One arm guy

Kids have an amazing ability to take things in stride. In Arroyo Wobagon, team OAG-Finneas kept up with and often exceeded whatever hair-brained thing it was that the kids were doing at the moment––A level of capability maintained into adulthood, as evidenced by those horsenastics photos.

 

Which brings me round to my regret (you thought I forgot, eh, eh?) as introduced ages ago in the first paragraph of this boring meander. I regret not studying Team OAG-Finnaes a heckava lot more as a kid. Because now I have kids and suddenly - BAM – like bad voodoo - I have no arms. NONE. Ever.

Having been both lazy and heavily-armed in the past, I'm pretty useless at managing armless industriousness. And I only have two kids, so I have to wonder what happens to parents of three or four. Do they lose their legs? And their minds? Wait...do I still have a mind?

Niña in a bottle

But even more than practicalities, it is the subtleties to do with fitting in and being understood that make me wish I'd paid more attention. You see, 'fitting in' is not the first phrase that springs to mind when I am careening a massive double-buggy around London public transport like some kind of mad circus act with a pair of poorly-trained clowns and no exit strategy. In these moments I feel like a square peg in a landscape of round holes (fix that badly-injured metaphor as you see fit). I suspect that in a very different manifestation, OAG knows this feeling very well.

Adversity and capability often go hand in hand. Just like trees, people grow around complications and learn from them. My kids both learned to walk by falling over onto their heads and plonking into furniture. As I watched them, I used to think of that William Blake quote: 'Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement, are roads of genius.'

Blake certainly never fit in - he saw angels in the treetops for cryin' out loud - a most unusual form of far-sightedness. Blake lived in Marylebone with his wife Catherine, where they enjoyed pastimes like nude sunbathing in the back garden. In addition to having a crooked genius (not a euphemism) one has to admire such confidence under English skies. Of course, naked prophets and seraphim can no longer afford Marylebone, unless you count a pub called the Angel in the Fields.

Reflecting

Needless to say, these days I am researching juggling techniques like a mad woman and totally open to suggestion. So should you, Team OAG-Finnaes, have any horsenastics tips for navigating the London underground with two clowns in tow and all marbles in tact, I am all ears. Consider this a plea for help and spare hands.

I found myself on Trafalgar Square recently under the shadow of a rain-cloud. The gleaming white marble woman is long gone. Lord Nelson, who lost an arm in battle, is still standing there atop his column with a pigeon still sat down on his head. Some things never change. In Alison Lapper's place there is a ship in a bottle, poised and waiting for fortunate winds, a high tide, and some ingeniously crooked way out of the flippin' bottle.

There was a busker singing under the ship that day. While my youngest daughter soaked her socks in rain puddles, he sang that old Leonard Cohen song about broken hallelujahs.

~Rachel Faith

i'm not dancing, i have an itch

I watched Inception last night, ostensibly for the first time. But in reality I had seen it before during my fourteen hour flight to India, after a beer, and between two other movies. Basically, I was only half conscious. So when I put it on last night, I suddenly remembered the last scene of the movie, like I'd dreamed it before. Weird.

Speaking of India, I had a call from Pascal this week. He said he's been keeping up with my blog. He wondered if I would write about missing India.

Joy (left) and Pascal examine papayas at market

"You know, it's not nice, I think, when you talk about things you can't do," he said.

"What do you mean, 'it's not nice?'" I pressed.

"Putting yourself down like that...it's not nice."

"But I'm not putting myself down. That's why I write about it."

"It's just not nice. You have to love yourself."

"But I do love myself, that's why I can write about it."

"Hey, listen," he said in typical change-the-subject fashion, "here's a joke..."

"Uh, OK."

I pretend to help

"There was this guy missing an arm..."

"Which arm was he missing?"

"I don't know, he was just missing an arm..."

"Well, was it the right arm or the left arm? That's very important, especially in your culture..." I said, teasing.

"I don't know! It doesn't matter, it's a joke," he said, irritated.

"OK, fine. There's a guy missing an arm..."

"So this guy with one arm goes up on top of a building to jump off...

"Because he's so depressed..." I offered.

"...but when he looks down," he continued, "he sees another guy missing two arms dancing in the street."

"OK."

"So he goes back down and asks the guy with no arms, 'Why are you so happy and dancing when you have no arms? And the guy with no arms says, 'I'm not dancing, I have an itch.'"

I waited for the moral, but Pascal just laughed. So, I guess I just won't jump off a building.

--------------------- 

Maybe Pascal was just reminding me to count my blessings. I went to the dentist yesterday and I have no cavities, so I'm off to a great start.

I told the hygienist about my book and she said, "I think it's good to read about other people's struggles, because it makes you grateful for what you have." 

"Ah, ha," I nodded, my mouth full of fingers and tubes.

"Like 9/11," she said, "but we forget so quickly." 

"Uh, huh, haaa," I said. She took her hands out of my mouth.

"What?" 

"But I think forgetting is human," I explained, "it's how we go on, how we survive."

"Yeah, that's true," she said, "my husband had to tell me to stop watching the news because it was making me depressed." 

It's just a theory, but I don't think comparing suffering ever really makes anyone feel better. More importantly, knowing the struggles of another reminds us we have something in common. It brings us together.
 

And what do we do once we get there? After last week's post, a couple people contacted me with possible solutions to my ponytail-making dilemma––interestingly, both of them were men. I understand my inability to make a ponytail is hardly on the UN's table of world crises, but the kindness was felt.
 

It's good to be grateful, but maybe not because we don't live in poverty or don't have a terminal illness. Maybe you don't have to stand on top of a building or feel guilty because someone else is worse off. You probably have enough dirty dishes in your sink to deal with.

There are plenty of people trying to be Atlas under the globe, wondering how we achieve world peace and personal happiness. So, in the meantime, if you know someone without arms with an itch, just scratch it.

And yes, India, I do miss you.

OneArmGirl

happy anniversary to me

Balloons, confetti, and kazoos! I've been so obsessed with generating top quality posts each week here at OneArmGirl, that I passed right over our one year anniversary last week and totally forgot. So here it is, my anniversary post...

Happy anniversary to me, happy anniversary to me, happy anniversary...

In celebration, I would like to present OneArmGirl with the very prestigious Elephant Holding a Heart Award for Not Starting a Blog, Then Leaving it Hanging Forever in Cyperspace with Only Two Posts to Irritate Everyone for Eternity––because elephants never forget. Congratulations!

(pause while OneArmGirl rises tearfully to the podium)

Wow. I can't believe it. Uh, I don't even have a speech prepared. I never thought I'd make it this far. I just want to thank everyone who made this all possible––

My fans, firstly, who make me believe every day that I might have something here; my parents for giving me life and not selling me into the circus as a child; Joey for giving me permission to have one arm; T. Pete my content adviser and career coach; my cousin Danielle who keeps me from pulling my hair out with technical difficulties, and Cameron for heading up my India IT division; my mother for emailing editorial comments each week; Audra my best friend and information security detail; my South African research team; Mañana Mama for being an inspiration in slacker blogging; Mikey Man for telling me I'm beautiful and amazing; to a number of you volunteer PR reps getting the word out; to all Germans everywhere because I'm sure they are somehow responsible for my success; and Jeff the general contractor who stopped the waterfall in my kitchen wall from a broken pipe last week, without whom I might now be writing this post from a rowboat in my living room.

Thank you.

And now, as a special treat, I'd like to take a little trip down memory lane with some OneArmGirl photo classics...

(Cue "Time of Our Lives" by Green Day)

Took a bit of effort to get a hold of one of these. Thankfully, I know a girl in film and yes, it is very very official, straight off the set of The Hobbit. Thanks, Kristen.

It was a good hook, wasn't it? It's all been downhill since this. Now you know how I put on deodorant and a bunch of much less useful information about me.

Despite the blog title, Finneas has become quite the star. Starlet? Here he is with one of his fans on an international tour.

This is from back in the day when I spent time and resources getting quality art for this blog. Now, I just look desperately through iPhoto for whatever works.

How could we forget Ferb-the-hook-armed-rabbit's unfortunate accident at the farm. Ferb, you're a real trooper––glad to have you on the team.

Just a reminder from Little Gen that we try not to take ourselves too seriously here at OneArmGirl, especially when we are in the presence of professionals. As Oscar Wilde said, "Life is too important to be taken seriously."

Attack of the baby Tyrannosaurus Rex, aka the prosthetic arm I was given to wear as a child.

When life gives you lemons...

...you make lemonade. Or, you turn your stub arm into a shark.

You ever find yourself in a situation that you couldn't have foreseen? And then someone takes a picture of it?

Ok, so I don't think this picture ever actually appeared on the blog, but it captures probably the one and only time that goat has ever even pretended to listen to me. He must have known it was staged.

I just can't look at this picture without laughing. I think it's the look on his face. Thank you, turtle skateboard prosthetics engineer.

One of many Photo Booth mooning shots. A person just can't get enough of those. Show me amused, but pensive.

What says celebration more than mosh-pit-lifting an armless, legless man in the air? Thanks, Nick. No, you're amazing. No YOU'RE amazing.

 

To the good times––may there be twenty more years! Not that I'm committing to anything.

OneArmGirl