‘We Tend to Face Problems as They Come’ : Blind Couple Rely on Love, Common Sense to Rear 2 Daughters
Now and then when her daughters were babies, Jean Shiner would wander the landscapes of their bodies with her hands. “I could feel them and know exactly who had a short nose and who had long fingers. It was neat.”
Now Esther is 5 and Judy 3, too big to sit still for such things. But the memory came back recently as Jean applied calamine lotion.
The actual location of their chicken pox rash eluded her, but “I just put it all over them. That way, I figured I’d hit it.”
Which pretty much sums up the common sense, humor and love Jean Shiner brings to rearing two children she cannot see.
Blind Since Birth
She has been blind all her life, but that never stopped her from learning to bicycle, ski or sail. It never stopped her from going to college, graduating with honors or earning a master’s degree.
Nor did it stop her from falling in love, with a deep-voiced, articulate man eight years her senior.
At the Perkins School for the Blind outside Boston, where Jean boarded from age 5, “you were encouraged to date sighted guys.”
“We had socials. They would bring in sighted kids, but then you’d never see them again. The idea was you should marry someone with a pair of eyes to drive you around and read to you and take care of you.”
Jean married Franklin Shiner, legally blind from birth--which pretty much sums up her attitude about being cared for.
Usual Ambience
The Shiners’ snug, red-shingled house has an ambience any parent can appreciate, from the crunch of a stray Cheerio in the kitchen to the deflating balloons strewn about the living room, stragglers from Judy’s birthday party. Counting the Shiner kids, the guest list numbered nine.
Outside is the timeless small-town summer symphony of chattering children, barking dogs and hissing lawn sprinklers, punctuated by slamming screen doors.
Each time the Shiners’ door opens, a bell rings. “On the first warm day of the year, when we all opened our doors for the first time, Judy kept running out,” Jean explained.
On this day, there was also the steady drone of the TV in the Shiner living room, a rare concession to chicken pox by a mother faced with entertaining two house-bound children, a visitor and a bored German shepherd.
She served coffee to the visitor, cheese puffs and juice to the girls, then poured herself a cup of tea and sank into a kitchen chair.
Frank Shiner had already strapped on his backpack and set off for Montpelier’s lone supermarket, a two-mile round trip he makes every other day. Jean likes to cook and has a well-stocked freezer, with a Braille map.
Guide Dog Takes Lead
On a normal day, Esther and Judy would have been outdoors by now, riding bikes, blowing bubbles or playing with other children. Lunch is a prelude to “quiet time,” followed by outings to the pool or the library with Seltzer the guide dog in the lead. Jean grips Seltzer’s harness and Esther pushes Judy’s stroller, a formation perfected over time.
“Esther will help me report stores as we walk downtown, if I go past where I wanted to go,” said Jean, 36, a slender woman with youthful good looks and a friendly, confident manner.
Other animals tend to be Seltzer’s downfall, and “Esther has learned to spot them a block away. She’ll yell ‘I see a dog! I see a cat!’
“Probably 10 years from now I’ll look back and say, ‘How did I do it?’ ” For the time being, however, Jean would much rather be called “ordinary” than “amazing,” as in, “Isn’t she amazing? She can walk down the street with her kids and her dog!”
Esther and Judy find Jean and Frank every bit as ordinary as most small children regard their parents. “Mommy is blind and she can’t see and Daddy is blind and he can see a little,” Esther explained in the slightly exasperated voice of big sisters everywhere. The interview ended abruptly as she lost interest and wandered back to “Sesame Street.”
Esther, immaculate in Oshkosh overalls, is the studious one, with thoughtful dark eyes, a neat cap of brown hair and dimples like her mother’s. Judy is a disheveled escape artist, hazel-eyed, round-faced and rambunctious.
Both girls report each other’s mischief except in cases of conspiracy, as when, in the interest of science, they snuck a little extra baking powder into their mother’s cookie dough. “They were really yucky,” Jean said cheerfully. “We ate them anyway.”
Tells on Sister
In the living room, the sound of crunching cheese puffs stopped abruptly, and Esther piped up right on cue.
“Judy’s stuffing her cheeks, Mommy.”
“Don’t stuff your cheeks, Judy.”
Jean relies on a combination of intuition and hearing to tell her when her kids are up to something. Like most mothers, she is seldom wrong.
“They get sat in the chair when I think they’re doing something.” The most common chair-sitting offense at the moment: “Looking out the window at neighbors who don’t go to bed when they do.”
Esther wandered into the kitchen scrunching a brown paper bag. “Sometimes I do this to bags,” she said solemnly, then dissolved into giggles as her mother swooped down and scooped her up in a hug. “Sometimes I do this to little girls,” Jean told her.
Stores Games Separately
Time to color. Esther and Judy sat at the table while Jean fetched their coloring books and crayons, stored, along with puzzles, games and cards, in separate bags in her bedroom closet.
The kids’ clothes are neatly folded in their dressers. Jean pins the shirts and pants together before she washes them, to keep her girls color-coordinated.
As the girls grow, so does the Shiners’ library. “I spend half my time figuring out how to get books,” Jean said. “I’m really envious of mothers in the library who can just pick up any book and read it to their kids.”
She also envies parents who can follow the puppet shows, finger plays and craft demonstrations at play groups and story hours. “Group situations are real hard. Everyone can look at the teacher and I can’t.”
Jean uses a leash to keep track of Judy in the pool during swimming lessons. “Esther is more compliant, but we talk to Judy a lot about boundaries. She’d wind up in East Calais if we didn’t.” Plans for a new fence in the back yard attest to the wanderlust of the youngest Shiner.
Lunchtime. Jean fixed tuna sandwiches, scraping carrots to serve on the side. Everything has its place in her kitchen--pots, pans, utensils. Temperature settings on her oven dials are specially marked, as are the microwave and egg timer. Spices are labeled in Braille.
Enjoy Family Rituals
Joining hands for grace is a Shiner ritual. So is the story hour that follows the meal. The girls cuddle next to Jean on the sofa. Seltzer’s tail thumps the carpet as she curls up at their feet.
“A guide dog is like another child,” said Jean, who rises early to put the big shepherd through her paces. “Her training is very intensive and I have to keep up with it.” Boredom is an occupational hazard for a dog trained in big-city traffic, then assigned to Vermont.
Jean is skilled at using a cane, but “a cane is an extension of your hand. For half the year in Vermont, all your landmarks are covered up. A dog is a living partner.” At the Shiners’, she is also a pet.
For the next half-hour, Jean read Bible stories to Judy. Esther has her own copy of the book and followed along, mouthing the words, her fingers brushing the print as her mother’s skim over the Braille.
Frank returned from the market, laden with provisions. “I’m putting the girls’ shampoo under the sink,” he said. “Where’s lunch?”
“On the counter, to the right of the sink.”
Play in Yard
The story continued, followed by a token attempt at a nap. Finally, Jean relented: The girls may play quietly in the yard.
Rearing two children without benefit of eyesight might seem overwhelming to some people, but Jean says it never really fazed her much. “We worried some, but we tend to face problems as they come up, one day at a time, one stage at a time.
“If I could see, I’d have to figure out from scratch how to be a sighted person. I’m used to listening, to using my other senses. If I could see for a day, I’d like to see what colors look like, what a sunset looks like. Then I would give it up.”
Jean’s blindness was caused by too much oxygen given her and her twin sister, Joan, after their premature birth. Some of Joan’s sight was saved, since she was slightly bigger and was removed from the Isolette first. Jean suffered optic nerve damage and sees only darkness.
Nevertheless, as a child growing up in Framingham, Mass., “Jean didn’t miss out on anything,” said her mother, Helen Harbberts. “If Joan got a coloring book and crayons, Jean got a coloring book and crayons. When Joan got a two-wheeler, Jeannie did too.”
Blames Medicine
Dorothy Shiner, Frank’s mother, thinks the anti-nausea medicine she took during pregnancy may have caused her son’s blindness. Two months after his birth, her sighted husband abandoned the family.
Dorothy Shiner, who also is blind, earned a living managing a snack bar in a Vermont state office building. Mainstreaming had not yet been envisioned, but “Frank was allowed to do whatever the other kids did. I brought him up to be independent.”
It never occurred to Jean and Frank not to have children, though Jean waited until she was pregnant to tell her mother. Both families shared the new parents’ joy and relief when Esther and Judy were born fully sighted.
Jean quit her job counseling disabled people to be a full-time mother, and Frank took paternity leave from his job producing a radio show for the Governor’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. A public health nurse supervised Esther’s first bath and feeding, but then the Shiners were on their own.
Despite all the baby books Jean studied during pregnancy, “I discovered that I didn’t know anything about raising a child before I had one--and neither did a lot of sighted people.”
For all its joys, parenthood is also a time of great vulnerability for the Shiners. Because they walk everywhere they go, Jean keeps the girls indoors when the temperature drops below zero. But otherwise, “we are out there, visible, whatever the weather,” Frank said.
“Most people ride by in their cars and their kid is in a car seat strapped into the back with the door locked and the window rolled up.”
No Steady Work
Despite his communications degree and experience, steady work in radio has eluded Frank during the 10 years since the state stopped funding his show. “In the past, I’ve sold myself short, working just to say I have a job.”
The Shiners get by on disability benefits, and Frank keeps busy with various disability rights organizations, but he struggles with the toll joblessness has taken on his confidence.
Rather then take another “survival” job, he has chosen to help rear his daughters until satisfying work comes along. “I read with them, I take time with them, I try to make the most of it. It’s an opportunity a lot of guys don’t get.”
For Jean, acceptance by other mothers is an ongoing struggle. “They can put their kid in someone’s car but they think twice about letting me pick up their child. I’m always having to earn their trust, to remind people: I’m blind, but I’m a person just like you.”
