Redefinition of Masculinity

By Ned Fielden

EDITOR: The following essay is one of 40 first-person stories that will appear in From There to Here: Stories of Adjustment to Spinal Cord Injury, edited by Gary Karp and Stanley Klein. The book, to be published in January, is available for pre-order for $15.95 from the Leonard Media Group, 888/850-0344, ext. 209. After publication, price will be $19.95.

It was a beastly hot Saturday afternoon in July 1989, the first day of my two-week summer vacation. I had just moved with my wife and two young kids from San Francisco to Healdsburg, a beautiful, small winery town in Sonoma County, a couple of hours to the north. At around 6 p.m., after an hour spent pushing the hand-mower around the front yard in the 100 degree heat had left me dripping with sweat, I mounted my bike to head down to the Russian River a half mile away for a cleansing plunge. It was the last proper swim I would ever have.

Cooled and feeling much better about life, I cycled back across the narrow bridge over the river. My thoughts drifted to the beauty of the rural surroundings on this first day of vacation from my job as an auto mechanic. Unknown to and unseen by me, a local yutz in a pickup truck came barreling along the road behind me, clipping the door of a parked car. Not one to stop for some petty property damage, in his hurry to get away he drove his truck bumper into my bike, tossing my body into the steel truss structure of the bridge. Hit and run.

It felt like someone had whacked me in the back with a two-ton two-by-four. As I recovered consciousness, I found myself upended, my legs thrown into the steel bridgework above me. My first sensation was the pounding pain in the middle of my back, the second the eerie observation that while my legs were covered with rivulets of blood, I could feel no pain from them at all.

A couple of days later, after they had carted me off to a local hospital while my HMO tried to figure out what to do with me, officially a T8 paraplegic, I had a conversation with a very sweet but cautious rehab doctor.

"Do you have any idea of the extent of your injuries?" he asked softly.

"Yes, pretty good. Flattened pelvis, punctured lung, but most of all a busted back."

"Do you know what that means?"

I had already figured this one out.

"I probably won't ever walk again." I felt oddly detached in this conversation, as if we were talking about someone else's predicament. I had grasped the essentials of the situation, but also knew instinctively that a drastically altered life was waiting for me around the corner--a life that I couldn't possibly imagine at that moment.

He seemed relieved to be dealing with someone willing to face facts. He also turned out to be the kindest and sanest of any rehab doctor I would ever meet. He treated me like an intelligent, sentient being--not an oddity or annoyance. I wish to hell I'd had a chance to work with him and not some of the other village idiots I would soon encounter, once they figured out what hospital would finally stitch me up.

It took six long, hard months to figure out a direction, and over a year to get my insurance company to pay up, as they bobbed and weaved and dodged their responsibilities--despite my having faithfully paid years of premiums. Only at knife-point ("lawyer-point," to be more accurate) did they relent, and a settlement gained me a couple of years of breathing room. But by then the marriage was over, and most of my support structure in tatters. Friends were far away and suddenly hard to reach, and all my normal coping mechanisms, such as athletics, were no longer adequate or satisfying. The country house was emptied and I reluctantly followed my kids when they moved with their mother back to the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Early post-accident, I got on the phone and started talking to everyone I knew who had a potentially interesting job. An old friend had gone to library school and had the best balance in his career--did interesting work with interesting people, and didn't seem in any danger of burning out. Much to everyone's surprise, vocational rehab agreed to pay for grad school. Because I had scored high on one of their tests, I think they saw me as a good long term risk; my ultimate salary would be higher than normal, and that meant more tax dollars back in the Treasury. I went on to earn master's degrees in history, and in library and information studies. Then I entered a historically female profession, though that wasn't a conscious factor in my choice. All this took three very long years.

Grad school and my newfound student friends were about the only personally pleasurable things that happened to me during this time. Virtually every part of my life connected to my past was painful in some degree. I could still play baseball with my 5-year-old son, Gene, but pitching to him was light years different. I still had to work out the dichotomy between my old "abled" life and my new vastly different landscape.

Gradually, I got to chalk up my achievements on their own merit. New people in my life didn't deal with Ned, the old friend who could change a Volkswagen engine in half an hour. They met Ned, the quick study who happened to be in a wheelchair. My 2-year-old daughter, Maggie, and I shared the pleasure of riding around town with her on my lap. She felt like royalty on her perch and squealed with pleasure when whizzing downhill at a ferocious clip.

I hadn't realized just how deeply it was possible to be unhappy. Losing use of my body and all the other trappings of civilized life accumulated over 34 years was enormously difficult. It was a tear-soaked, depressing, demoralizing time that expended my reserves of patience and energy. I had even wondered, one particularly hopeless night, if it was possible to become dehydrated from crying too much.

Every sign of pain in someone else was a trigger for my own. Worse, every sign of pleasure in someone else--a cyclist, a game of Frisbee, a couple walking hand-in-hand on the beach--triggered tears as well. I had never envied anyone my whole life, and now I envied an 80-year old man who could hobble out his front door and pick up his own newspaper. Every morning it was a struggle to lift my dead legs out of bed and toss them back in the saddle for another day. But I felt I had no choice. My kids, and their need to have a father--one who didn't give up--drove me. While they wished my accident hadn't happened, Gene and Maggie were sweet, wonderful, inquisitive beings. It didn't matter whether I was in a wheelchair or not, only that I was there for them. I owe them, big time.

The dissolution of my marriage was devastating in its own right--an insult upon injury. My wife insisted over and over again that my disability had nothing to do with our troubles, but from my point of view the accident had altered everything. I had been a happy, productive person, and felt happily married up to the point of the death of half of my body.

The truth is likely somewhere in between. She felt emotionally abandoned as I coped with my own depression, and we had not done well handling the grief over the change in our sexual life. Down deep, I believe she wanted to break up, and so found increasing cause to be angry with me. The harder she distanced from me, the more I clutched at her, which she then found oppressive, and the harder I clutched--a cycle familiar to many broken relationships.

The overturning of roles was also likely a large piece of the troubles--I had gone from very "masculine" employment as an auto mechanic (99 percent guys) to a stay-at-home dad and student. I had lost all my "normal" guy roles--big home repairs, putting up fences, digging ditches, mowing the damn lawn. My confidence was rattled to the roots. To carry on, I was faced with a drastic redefinition of masculinity.

As my very wonderful psychotherapist noted, no accident of this magnitude can help but shred some marital fabric. We had exhausted the vital residual goodwill that needs to be built up and held in reserve for successful relationships. Looking back, I should have trusted my own self-reliance much more and had confidence in my ability to pull myself out of tough situations. At the time, that was too much to ask.

In grad school, I discovered that my sense of humor had acquired--as a result of my near-death experiences and all the other extracurricular social absurdities of wheelchair life--a devastating swiftness and acerbic tenor that others found attractive. In library school, irreverence was appealing, even to my chief victims--the faculty. I was one of two students chosen to speak at the library school graduation at Berkeley in 1992. My words were barbed and, judging from the audience response, at least passably amusing.

During the last few months of the program I had begun to date a couple of the other students. My first date, three years post-accident and my first in 15 years, was nerve-wracking to an unimaginable degree for the whole two hours we had lunch. She with the shining almond eyes, fetching smile and soft insight. Me with more baggage than a 19th-century Klondike mining mule. Dating became a "whattaya got to lose?" proposition. In this case, I was so smitten that it would have taken a tank of sharks to keep me from trying to get to know her better.

The ethics of the situation seemed impossible. When and how does one begin the process of full disclosure? How do you tell someone you have a defunct marriage, two kids who stop by to stay a few days a week, and a lower body which not only doesn't walk, but doesn't do much of anything except get in the way and hurt? Luckily no one turned tail straight away.

My first job was extremely part-time--I had picked a bad time to be a new librarian in California, as a recession was in full swing. The library director at Sonoma State University had queried her own brood of librarians, and it seemed that the only librarian position that might pose problems to someone in a wheelchair was reference, since you needed to dash around the collection with a certain amount of manic energy. Naturally, I had to try it just to see if I could do it, and arranged for an internship there. I was driven and focused to an extraordinary degree and felt I had to prove to every naysayer that I not only was an adequate librarian, but superior. The internship led to part-time work, and some teaching.

I landed a job as a librarian at San Francisco State University in 1995, got tenure and a promotion in 2001, and have not looked back. Academic life has its own absurdities, but my hypothesis is that people with disabilities are unusually adept at coping with the Byzantine structure of university culture, having the experience we do with Kafka-esque bureaucracies. We don't give up easily.

Best of all, I married a wonderful fellow library school student, whom my older kids took to with unflinching enthusiasm. For many months, I lived the kind of charmed life reserved only for lovers. I looked forward to the end of each day when I could make dinner for Lucy and ask her the thousand and one questions about her life that had been brewing in my brain all day. I never could have imagined, in the dark months post-accident, this progression and how nice it would be. We got married in June 1996, three years after we met and almost six years after my accident. We had figured out real fast that kids were not going to happen the easy way, and with the help of the very latest in reproductive technology--and a quarter of a year's salary--we were able to conceive and raise two more kids, who are not just the apple, but the orchard, of their father's eye. Five-year old Aaron still gets to ride on my lap on the flat and downhill--too heavy for uphill now--and my 2-year old Heather goes everywhere on my lap. They are my scouts and future--long live kids everywhere!

Ned Fielden lives in Berkeley, Calif., with his wife Lucy, teenagers Maggie and Gene and youngsters Aaron and Heather. He is a reference and instructional librarian at San Francisco State University and has written on Internet search engines.

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