You know how I've posted before about the "identified patient" game that family used to play with me. The life script they have written for me seems to be that I am disabled and incapable, possibly even mentally challenged. I had an aunt who fit that description, and was often compared to her. Also, I wasn't taught to drive until later in life, because for whatever reason, it was just assumed I couldn't learn.

Well, I just saw a photo online of an adult tricycle (meant for elderly people) and my mind flashed back to my first marriage. A member of our church had an adult tricycle for sale, and my then-husband actually considered buying it for me. He didn't end up buying it, but he was seriously looking into it. Easier and less expensive than teaching me to drive, I suppose? What strikes me as odd--then and now--is that I was in my early twenties. Even glossing over the driving issue, I knew how to ride a bicycle, and I was healthy and able-bodied at the time. What made him think a tricycle would be the appropriate mode of transportation for me?

My suspicion is that it played along with the life-script. He wanted me on a tricycle, not on a bicycle and certainly not in a car, because it confirmed his mental image of me having something wrong with me. He wanted to see me as childish in some way, and therefore less than him. That's my theory, anyway.

And I think it would be the same way with my mother, who at about the same time period had a tendency to want to dress me in rompers and shortalls.

I think I'll always wonder why they had so much invested in the notion that I'm somehow defective, but I don't believe I'll ever know.