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

horsenastics

There are things one might ask a one-armed girl how she does....like tie her shoe, or peel an orange, or put on underwear. And then there are things that no one thinks to ask, like how do you stand up on a trotting horse.

I’d certainly never thought to ask before a summer day, six years ago, when I met Rick Hawthorne. As I recall, the first thing Rick said when he saw me was “Oh, yeah!” when he recognized my one arm situation. Rick's left arm had been amputated at the shoulder when he was ten, after he punched a kid in the playground, breaking his arm in several places. The doctors found cancer and that’s when Rick began his life as a one-armed boy.

In his early twenties, Rick found vaulting, a sport that combines riding and dance on the back of a horse. It was the beginning of a life-long love story for Rick, who went on to compete with one arm at the national level. Today, he and his wife Virginia have been coaching vaulting for over thirty years.

But in all that time, Rick had never met someone like me, with almost exactly the same handicap. The excitement was mutual. I hadn’t known him five minutes before I was up on a horse, learning the basic exercises. Buoyed by Rick’s belief in me, I would have tried nearly anything he asked. I went home sore and hooked.

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On Saturday, I hurried Little Gen out of her warm bed to go to vaulting practice with me. The jury's out on whether my blueberry pancakes were extortion on her part, or bribery on mine. Either way, we were out the door by 9:30am.

I. Warm-up

Here is a series of me 'vaulting up' on the practice barrel.


And the outtakes....

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You do what on a horse?, is generally the look on a person's face when I try to explain vaulting. Most people immediately assume I'm talking about gymnastics or pole vaulting; or they combine the two with a mental picture of me running up to a horse and jumping over the top of it. Ridiculous. But then, I'm not in much of a position to talk.

Vaulting has been around as long as most anything, varying from artistic expression to military training, depending on the demands of the time. But it's modern form was developed in post-war Germany to improve general riding skill.

Much later, Joey coined 'horse ballet' when I started coming into work sore from head to toe, barely able to walk. Even later, my friend Ariel dubbed 'horsenastics.' Both accurate and clever, I say; though a bit hard to pronounce without spitting on someone. And horsenastics leads to the obvious conclusion that an athlete in said sport is a 'horsenast,' which sounds like a bad head cold, but gives me endless giggles.

II. On the horse

Eventually, I get on the actual horse. The person in the middle of the circle, directing the movement of the horse, is the longeur. She keeps the horse going while I do my acrobatics...or just sit there out of breath, trying to remember the next exercise.

The 'flag,' with one leg and one arm extended, is one of the compulsory exercises in vaulting; but it's always been my strongest move. Here, the horse is going to the right on the circle, which makes it even more challenging because I have to raise a leg on the same side where I don't have an arm. No big deal.

The nice thing about being a one-armed girl is that if you can do anything on the back of a moving horse, you have everyone's attention, and are automatically amazing. And on a good day, you have your photographer sister along to capture this...


The 'stand', somewhat obviously named, was completely out of my comfort zone the first time I tried it. Standing straight up on the back of a large animal, nothing to hold onto, seems counter-intuitive, to say the least. And to be honest, I'm hard pressed to imagine the need for this in a wartime situation, unless you're trying to distract the enemy by giving the impression that you've lost your mind. But then, we're talking about Germans here, for whom over-achievement is the least that's expected. And in feats of athletic prowess, they were just borrowing from the Spartans. Best thing about the stand: no arms required.

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It felt good to get out on Saturday. Vaulting seems one step away from superhero status. As a human, I've had many long hiatuses in the past five years, when I was too weak to leave the house, much less get on a horse. Even now, one practice can put me under the weather for days. That's the part people don't see when I'm the girl with one arm standing on a trotting horse. I have daydreams of performing before huge crowds, doing a one arm hand-stand to the tune of 'Rock Me' by Great White. But I've left practice in tears, realizing the gulf between reality and imagination, which is constantly getting the better of me. And I want to quit. Like when I quit piano lessons because I didn't think I could be better than the best two-handed player.

I wasn't able to vault at all last winter, which gave my head some time to clear. I wasn't meeting my expectations, true. Nationals were out of the question, I can't even get up on the horse by myself. Why was I vaulting at all?, I wondered.

And this is what I got: I've never cared much for competition, ribbons or awards. I vault because I believe in the sport, because it's beautiful and therapeutic and exciting to watch. Rick isn't an amazing vaulter because he's the best; he's extraordinary because he gives other people reason to believe. I want to be extraordinary, too; and that is not beyond possible.

After all, Beethoven was deaf.

OneArmGirl


[*This post made possible by the contributions of Little Gen...and viewers like you.]