Live Is Blind

Live Is Blind

PHOTO/CAPTION: Jerry and Nancy Yeager with daughter Tracy in the

rain forest near Cairns, Australia.

Love Is Blind

by Liz Corcoran

From the Editor: Lots of sighted people, and a number of blind ones as well,

presume that no blind person could be a good parent. Thousands of successful blind parents

make a mockery of this prejudice every day, but it is important to keep reminding the

families of blind children and those who are just beginning to deal with their own

blindness of the truth that blindness need have little to do with a parent's ability to

rear well-adjusted, capable children.

The following article first appeared in the October 17, 1997, issue of Who

magazine. Nancy and Jerry Yeager are raising their daughter Tracy with love and

conscientious attention to her needs. They are active members of the National Federation

of the Blind of Virginia, and their Federation philosophy shines forth in everything they

say about the challenges and pleasures of parenthood. Here is the article:

For Nancy and Jerry Yeager blindness is no obstacle to having a happy family life.

Tracy Yeager's parents are stricter than most. When they call their bubbly blonde

daughter, she must answer—no argument.

A simple move from the swings to the slide requires prior warning. Now she's six, she

doesn't always have to hold their hands, though she often does anyway.

The rules have been imposed for good reason. Tracy's parents—Jerry, forty-two, and

Nancy, forty-five, are blind. "We expect kids to do things that are naughty

sometimes," says Jerry, sitting at the dining table in the family's modern apartment

in Alexandria, Virginia, "but if she does something because we can't see it,

something she wouldn't try around another adult, I think we have to come down on her

doubly hard."

Not that much escapes them. A barely audible sniffle from Tracy in another room sends

Jerry grabbing for a tissue. When she bounds noisily through the apartment, Jerry laughs

and exclaims, "Uh oh! Here's a girl with tap shoes!" before picking her up and

flipping her through his arms.

In the kitchen Nancy is making breakfast. With half a finger in each cup she pours hot

coffee until it hits the tip. Jerry puts Tracy down and reaches into the fridge. He picks

up a packet and smells to check that it's bacon and fresh, while Tracy, anxious to get in

on the action, lines a baking tray with foil. "She loves to help," smiles Nancy,

feeling that the foil has made it to the edge of the tray, but, she adds, "only under

supervision."

The Yeagers, who married in 1988, have worked hard to make life normal for their

daughter. They are both congenitally blind, so there was a slight chance that Tracy would

be born blind, but that wasn't their main concern. "We knew we could deal with

that," says Jerry. Rather, they considered the difficulties they would face bringing

up a child in a sighted world and how they'd juggle their full-time careers: Jerry as a

contract specialist in the Department of the Navy in Washington, D.C., and Nancy as a

payroll manager for the Farm Credit Administration.

They consulted other blind couples and decided they could pull it off.

"It's a learning project," says Nancy matter-of-factly, "an extension of

the philosophy we had that most things you can do without sight. As I go along, there will

be things I'm going to have to figure out. But I've been figuring out how to do things all

my life, so it's not really different."

As a baby Tracy seemed to know that her parents couldn't see her. Nancy recalls that

when her daughter was about two months old, she'd let them know she was hungry by putting

her finger to their mouths. Unfamiliar objects—including a sticky caterpillar on one

occasion—were dumped unceremoniously into her parents' palms for identification.

"Nancy noticed it was wet," says Jerry, "so it had probably been in her

mouth. That sort of grossed her out!"

The critter was mercifully intact—but what has proved "irksome,"

according to Jerry, is other people's doubt about their ability to cope. There were those

who wondered at the beginning how, being blind, they could possibly care for a child;

others who said to Nancy as Tracy grew that the couple were "lucky. I'm sure she's a

big help to you."

Jerry laughs wryly at those "who give a five-year-old credit for much more

adult-like knowledge and instinct than they would ever possibly have" and cites

shopkeepers who give Tracy the change at the till, or passers-by who point to a

destination and tell Tracy, not her parents, how to get there. Says Nancy: "I don't

want her to have that kind of responsibility. We didn't have her to be a little guide. We

had her because we wanted to nurture a child."

And nurture they do, making up for their lack of eyesight in other ways. Jerry concedes

that "there are probably cute scenes that we don't see that other parents would think

we're missing," but says he loves holding Tracy in his arms and reading to her from

one of her Braille books. Nancy supplements Tracy's school lessons at home by helping her

cut out shapes and sometimes visits the school to read to her class from Braille books.

"All the kids want to feel my book," she says. "It's good for her and good

for her classmates to see that her parents do the same kind of stuff that their parents

do."

The Yeagers spend as much time educating others as they do Tracy on what it's like to

be blind. "I don't want her to grow up thinking that she's amazing because she takes

care of her poor, unfortunate parents," says Nancy. "Or that she's deprived and

doesn't get things that other kids get."

There's little chance of that. Later that day the Yeagers take Tracy to a birthday

party at the local Chuck-E-Cheese's—a kids' mini theme park. It is an aural and

physical obstacle course for the Yeagers, who just manage to keep smiling while kids rush

pass them and they try to negotiate the scattered tables and chairs. Tracy, on the other

hand, is in her element, dragging Jerry around and shouting to him to let her go on more

rides. Jerry obliges and slips her a token, but Nancy finds it all a little overwhelming

and eventually steps in with an offer of dinner at McDonald's. "A little bribery

never hurts," she laughs.

Later Jerry recalls something Tracy once said. "Out of the blue she said, `Daddy,

I wish I was blind like the rest of my family.'" Blindness, he says, is something

people fear most, second to cancer, "but it's clear from what she said that it's not

negative for her." Nor for her parents. "I'm not going to tell you that I

wouldn't like it if I could see," says Nancy, but "I was brought up with the

idea that you got whatever you got, so make the most of it."