To Those Who Infantilize Me

When I was a little girl, my teachers put me in the corner with crayons.

I was blind. I had very little usable vision. And instead of figuring out how to include me, they stuck me in a corner by myself and forgot about me. My mom had to pop into my classroom randomly to make sure they weren’t doing it. Not once. Not twice. Regularly. She had to physically show up and check, because she couldn’t trust the adults in that room to treat her blind child like a person.

I was a child who spoke in full sentences at six months old. I read a medical dictionary for fun at age six. But to the adults in that school, I was a blind kid in a corner with crayons. That was their idea of accommodation. Put her somewhere she won’t be in the way.

I’m 34 now, and the pattern hasn’t stopped. It just changed shape.

My father called me “Little-Miss-Talk-Too-Much” when I was a kid. Then he upgraded to “Lanie Complainy.” My mom hated it, but he was controlling and abusive, and there was no stopping him. He had my mom convinced I was a hypochondriac. He had the staff at my residential school convinced too. It took me years to get past that, and I still don’t always trust my own body.

I wasn’t a hypochondriac. I had undiagnosed IIH, a condition where pressure builds in my skull. I’d say “my hair hurts” because I didn’t have the words for what was happening. I’d hate bassy music in cars because the vibration made the pressure worse. But when a child says her hair hurts and the adults decide she’s complaining, they stop looking. They stop seeing. And a little girl with a brain condition goes untreated for decades because her father decided she was “Lanie Complainy” and everyone believed him.

The last time I saw my father, he talked to me in baby talk. We were at a surprise party my mom had thrown for me. He said “purprise” the way you’d say it to a baby. That word, that baby-talk version, was one they used for the actual babies in the family. He said it to me, a grown woman, in front of people.

I’ve had nothing to do with him since.

Before that, when I was homeless and had to live with him for a while, I’d just been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I was excited because I’d found online support groups. I went to tell him and Lacie, and I guess they thought I was going to be negative. Next thing I knew, they were both yelling at me. He didn’t stop when I started crying. He didn’t walk away. He kept at it until I was in a full autistic meltdown, crying and screaming. Then he told me I was acting like a two-year-old. He created the meltdown and then used it as proof that I was a child.

There was another time, before I went away to school. My mom wasn’t home, and my cane was in her car. My dad was supposed to help me get ready for school, and we couldn’t find it. I got upset, because without my cane I couldn’t get to school independently. He hit me with a brush. A blind child was upset about losing her cane, the tool that lets her navigate the world, and his response was to hit her.

I remember once, before the divorce, my mom tried to get me to go talk to him on the back porch. I didn’t want to. I was maybe fifteen. I think I knew even then that he wasn’t comfortable with me or my disabilities, and that made me not want to be near him. A child shouldn’t have to know that her own father is uncomfortable with her existence. But I knew.

My sisters learned from him. There are three of them: Lacie, the oldest after me; Lexis, the third oldest of us four; and Lindy, the youngest.

They talk to me like a child. Like I can’t think for myself. When I stood up for my mom, they said it wasn’t really me typing. They said it was my mom. Because obviously, the blind, disabled sister couldn’t have her own opinions. Obviously, if I was defending my mom, it must be my mom putting words in my mouth. They couldn’t conceive of me as someone with her own mind.

When they realized it was actually me, they didn’t apologize. They shifted. They tried to turn me to their side, saying I didn’t have the whole story. I tried to be fair and listen, which scared my mom, made her think I was turning. But I wasn’t turning. I was listening, and then I was deciding for myself. When I wouldn’t turn against my mom, that’s when they called and yelled at me until I was in tears.

One Christmas, my mom was away and I had to spend the holiday with my dad and sisters. I tried. I stayed out in the living room. I interacted. I was there, in the middle of everything, doing exactly what they’d criticized me for not doing before. They took pictures. Family pictures. Group shots. And they deliberately excluded me from every single one.

I didn’t even know they were taking pictures. I’m blind. I couldn’t see them doing it. I was sitting right there, participating, and they made me invisible.

When my mom got the pictures, she called me. She was upset. She thought I’d hidden in a room all day, which is what I tend to do when things get chaotic, but I told her no, I was out there the whole time. She called Lacie to ask about it. Lacie had nothing to say. “Yeah, she was there.” That was it. No explanation. No apology. Just confirmation that I was present and they still left me out.

Along with those pictures, Lacie sent my mom a letter. She threatened to tell her own daughter, my niece, that my mom was dead. Not that she’d distance them. Not that she’d limit visits. That she’d tell a child her grandmother had died, and make it permanent. She used her own daughter as leverage.

That’s not discipline. That’s cruelty.

Lacie took over Thanksgiving. She started hosting it herself, with my other two sisters, and she’d invite my mom to a separate dinner afterward, with my aunt and a couple other people. My mom wouldn’t have gotten to see my sisters or the kids. Just Lacie, presenting the scraps as a generous offer. Thanksgiving was my mom’s holiday to pass on to them. Lacie took it from her and then claimed she’d invited her, as if a leftover dinner after the real one counted as inclusion.

She did the same thing with therapy. She says she said yes to therapy, but only if she got to pick the therapist. She never followed through. She says she wants to talk to my mom, but only when my mom is already upset, not when she’s calm and can actually have a conversation. She sets conditions she knows won’t be met, and then says she tried.

When my mom was away before that, I was alone in an upstairs apartment. I had untreated fibromyalgia. My Medicaid had been cut off. I couldn’t travel independently. Lacie did the bare minimum. She’d drop by with groceries sometimes. She never got me out of the house. She never checked on what else I needed. She did just enough to say she’d helped.

Once, my water heater broke and I needed a shower. I called my dad. He told me to boil water on the stove and use that. For a disabled woman with fibromyalgia, carrying pots of boiling water is dangerous. But that was his solution. That was the extent of his help.

When my mom needed hospital care and wouldn’t go because there was no one to care for me or the animals, I called Lacie for help. She told me to call an ambulance. She refused to come herself. When my mom wouldn’t go to the hospital without someone to care for me, Lacie called her ridiculous. My mom and I had to push things until she almost died so the hospital would actually keep her. Because Lacie wouldn’t show up. Because helping wasn’t worth her time.

Lexis screamed at my mom on the phone while she was having a blood transfusion. Screamed at a woman receiving a blood transfusion. Then she tried to convince me to have my mom committed. Later, she told people I was the one who suggested it. That never would have entered my mind. Lexis said it. She planted it. And then she rewrote history to make it mine.

Lexis won’t let my mom see her boys. She uses them as leverage, the same way Lacie uses my niece. One of her sons is autistic. My mom and I might know a little something about autism, but Lexis isn’t interested in our advice. She’d rather keep the boys away from their grandmother than accept help from someone who actually understands what her son is going through. She’d rather be right than be helped.

Lindy is the complicated one.

When we were kids, they thought I had glaucoma. Light hurt my eyes. She knew it. She’d flash the lights off and on, off and on, watching me flinch. Watching me in pain. She was a little kid, and she’d found a way to hurt her blind sister and make it a game. She’d also offer to refill my glass of tea and put pickle juice in it. The pickle juice was just a kid being a kid. The lights were something else. She could see what it did to me, and she did it anyway.

But here’s what makes Lindy complicated: for a long time after I lost my vision, she was the one who took care of me. When we went to parties or anything at my dad’s, she was the one who made sure I had what I needed. She made sure I wasn’t put in a corner and forgotten about, the way he tended to do. She knew what that felt like, being left out and overlooked, because she’d seen it happen to me. And for a while, she was the one who stopped it.

That’s what makes what came after so hard.

Lindy won’t talk to my mom at all now. She had my mom escorted away from her high school graduation by police. Her own mother, at her graduation, and she had her removed. She spreads lies about my mom on the internet. She was the sister who lived with my dad the most, the one he turned, the one who ran back to him every time my mom tried to enforce a rule. She learned from him that cruelty is something you can get away with. She started with the lights. She became the one who protected me from being forgotten. And then she became the one who does the forgetting.

Lindy’s reached out like she still wants a relationship with me. But it’s the same deal Lacie offers: have a relationship with me, just put what I’ve done to your mom to the side. I can’t do that. Not for any of them. They’ve all been cruel, and I know it’s not right.

Lacie texted me recently. “Hey Lanie. I heard you moved out. How are you doing?” Casual. Light. As if years of cruelty hadn’t happened. As if treating me like a child, yelling at me until I cried, excluding me from family pictures, and threatening my mom with erasure from her grandchild’s life were just things that blew over. Then she called me, saying she wants to have a relationship, saying we shouldn’t let mom get in the way.

Mom isn’t in the way. Lacie. Lindy. Lexis. You are. All of you are. Every one of my sisters wants the same thing: a relationship with me that requires ignoring what you’ve done to my mom. Put it to the side. Don’t let it get in the way. Act like the cruelty didn’t happen. I can’t do that. Not for any of them. They’ve all been cruel, and I know it’s not right.

That’s the pattern. It’s been the pattern my whole life. Teachers put me in a corner. My father was uncomfortable with my disabilities and left. My sisters talked to me like a child, hurt me for fun, and then abandoned me when I needed help. The people who were supposed to include me, didn’t. The people who were supposed to show up, wouldn’t.

Infantilization and abandonment are two sides of the same coin. One says “you can’t.” The other says “I won’t.” Both of them land the same way: you’re not worth engaging with as a full person. One puts you in the corner with crayons. The other just doesn’t show up. And when you’re multiply disabled, when you need more support than most people, both of those things happen to you over and over until you start to wonder if maybe they’re right.

They’re not right.

I’m writing this from a hospital bed in a nursing home. I’m 34. I have 25 published articles. I’ve submitted work to Rooted in Rights. I designed and direct a screen-reader-first game for blind and multiply disabled players. I write about accessibility, privacy, chronic illness, and what it means to build a life when the systems around you weren’t designed for you. I do this with fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, IIH, and thirty-plus chronic conditions, on a body that fights me every single day.

I do this because I can think for myself. I always could.

The people who infantilized me weren’t protecting me. They were protecting themselves from having to see me as I am: a full person with a complex life, who needs support, and who deserves it without having to prove she’s worth it. They didn’t put me in the corner because I couldn’t participate. They put me in the corner because participating with me would have required them to change. And they didn’t want to.

So to those who infantilize me, and to those who abandoned me: I’m still here. I’m still writing. I’m still thinking. I’m still building a life you said I couldn’t build. And I’m doing it without you.

I was never the one who couldn’t. You were the ones who wouldn’t.