The Cost of Impairment

I walked into the kitchen last night to find Susan struggling to fill the dishwasher with pots and dishes from the sink. She had accomplished most of the chore, but she was visibly fatigued. Although she is the one who typically loads the dishwasher and does the laundry, I have been doing both chores for the past three weeks.

Our rhythms for such chores are different. I do three or four loads of laundry a week; she perhaps does one and then only when we are facing going naked. I wash dishes every couple of days; she waits until the dirty dishes are overflowing in the sink, and it requires n-dimensional mathematics to load them into the dishwasher efficiently. A Tesseract is just a 4-dimensional hypercube – don’t let Stan Lee’s minions tell you otherwise. I prefer solid geometry myself although I have been known to handle n-dimensional hypercubes deftly when doing business analytics/business intelligence work.

But back to the arduous task of loading the dishwasher. The thing is that depending on a knee scooter comes at a high energy cost. It is simply more work to move, reach, bend, etc. if one has a mobility impairment. And it doesn’t matter whether that impairment comes from arthritis, injury, surgery, a prosthetic joint or some other reason; physical impairments come with an efficiency and energy cost. It sucks to be impaired.

I finished loading the dishwasher and told Susan that watching her load the dishwasher reminded me of the costs of being poor. Both of us grew up in one-income households in which the wage earner had a college education. So, neither of us grew up in poverty as such, but my home had four mouths to feed, and Susan’s had seven. Naturally, both families were frugal and very conscientious savers. Looking back at our families of origin and comparing them to our own two-income professional household, it is pretty obvious to us that despite being quite thrifty ourselves, we spend much less time and effort making shopping decisions than our parents did. Susan still spends time reading labels and calculating unit costs when she shops. I almost never do.

That is part of the cost of being poor. Financial decisions, even the most routine, require much more effort and time for folks who are poor. People with means go to an automobile dealership and agonize over whether they should get the silver one or the red one, whether they really want to pay for an SXM subscription, and so on – never concerned as much about the price as they are about whether their personal preferences will be satisfied. Poor people go to the used car lot and agonize over whether they can afford the monthly payment and have enough left over to cover liability insurance let alone food and rent. It takes longer to make an optimal decision when one has limited means. The task is simply more difficult.

I think that our poor get a bum rap. Being poor, like being old, or being in any way impaired is much harder than being wealthy, young, and completely able-bodied. I have at different times in my life, been all six. I know that many of you and your families have as well. As my good orthopedic colleague told me years ago when he put me in a cast for a hand fracture:

“You’ll be out this cast in eight weeks. In the meantime, use this experience to appreciate what life is like for folks who have permanent disabilities.”