[nukkad] Choosing a winning outlook

[adheer <>]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 "All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous 
beginning." - Albert Camus 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Choosing a winning outlook
An international award celebrates the daily victories
of a determined woman born without limbs but with a
will to succeed
By ANNYSA JOHNSON
of the Journal Sentinel staff



The next time you're frustrated by some obstacle on
the job, some minor annoyance at home, think for a
minute about Anne Rindfleisch.

Born without arms or legs, the 37-year-old Brown Deer
woman runs the computer room at a local retailer. She
loves Admirals hockey and shopping and hanging out
with her boyfriend.

And though every move of every day poses a challenge -
from answering the phone to powering up her desktop -
she's not much for bitterness or self-pity.

"Your life is what you put into it," said Rindfleisch,
fresh off a whirlwind tour of Washington and an
audience with President Bush.

"If you make it productive and happy, you'll be
happy," she said. "If you're always a downer, you
won't."

Rindfleisch's philosophy on life - as much as her
accomplishments in the workplace - are what have
focused an international spotlight onto this usually
unassuming woman in recent weeks, say family and
friends.

Named Goodwill Industries International's Graduate of
the Year, Rindfleisch used the congratulatory trip to
the nation's capital last week to lobby Bush and
lawmakers for improved programs for those with
disabilities.

A reluctant celebrity who's prone to blushing when the
topic turns to her, Rindfleisch doesn't see herself as
being special. Her successes, she says, arise from a
never-say-no attitude born of a life of struggle,
although her childhood in some ways was as typical as
any.

"My parents never sheltered or coddled me,"
Rindfleisch said. "They always encouraged me to do for
myself as much as I could."

But for the longing of her family, life might not have
turned out that way.

"It was five months before we brought her home," said
Jean Rindfleisch, recalling with guilt even now the
painful decision to have their daughter
institutionalized.

At the urging of family members and a nurse who
predicted Anne would not live beyond the age of 8, the
couple placed her in Southern Colony, the Union Grove
facility for the developmentally disabled.

"But we missed her right away," said Anne's father,
Alan. "We went to visit her all the time."

The family could no longer leave her when, during one
visit, their then 5-year-old son, Jon, looked at his
sister, then back at them and said, "We've got to
bring her home."

And so began what was, by all accounts, a pretty
normal childhood.

Within months, Anne was fitted with a "bucket," as she
calls it, to help her sit upright, and later a
wheelchair.

Playing Barbies, swimming
As she grew older, she was drawn into the childhood
games of her two brothers and the other kids on her
Whitefish Bay street.

She played Barbies with her girlfriends - they held
her doll, and she supplied the voice. At 8, her
friends would pull her out of her chair and bounce
with her on a huge backyard tire. As a young teen,
she'd tag along on her brother's dates at the
drive-in.

And she loved to swim, said Rindfleisch, whose father
fitted her with a foam ring that allowed her to float.

"My brothers would pick me up and literally toss me
into the pool. People would freak out, thinking they
were torturing me," she said. "But I'd come up and
scream, 'Do it again.' "

Rindfleisch's sense of humor and sometimes mischievous
inclinations also appeared early. Because she was so
small at the age of 3, her mother would carry her
around in a bunting, those cuddly, sack-like baby
garments that revealed only the face. So, it wasn't
unusual to have passers-by stop to coo over the little
one inside.

"You should have seen their faces when I started to
talk to my mother in full sentences," Rindfleisch
laughed.

Quick with a joke
Even today, friends and family say, her sense of humor
is one of her most fun and disarming features. In the
hoopla preceding her trip to Washington, she was
chatting with co-workers at the Burlington Coat
Factory store in Brown Deer about all the hurdles one
must clear before entering the White House.

"The next thing they'll want to do is fingerprint me,
and good luck, Charlie, on that one," she's said.

Always a bit of a practical joker, Rindfleisch took
pleasure as a child in rolling her torso across the
living room floor and untying her father's
shoestrings.

"I told her, 'If you're going to untie those shoes,
you're going to have to learn to tie them,' " her
father said. "And she did, with her mouth.

"I guess she proved to me there's not a whole heck of
a lot she couldn't do."

That was a truism Rindfleisch would illustrate again
and again over the years.

She performed so well academically at Gaenslen School
in Milwaukee for disabled children that she decided
when it came time for high school to enroll instead at
Whitefish Bay. That was long before the Americans with
Disabilities Act or a widespread acceptance of the
notion that disabled children can be served just as
well in mainstream schools.

"I was so worried for her - you know how cruel kids
can be," said Jean Rindfleisch, who was persuaded
finally by her daughter's physical therapist at
Gaenslen.

"She said, 'Anne's got such a good brain, she has to
use it.' And she was right.

Independent at school
At Whitefish Bay and later at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Anne Rindfleisch stunned faculty
with her fierce independence. She refused help with
note-taking and insisted on writing out her exams as
she'd always done - with a pencil in her mouth.

"She was quite extraordinary. She asked for nothing in
the way of special accommodations," recalled Joan M.
Jones, director of social work at the university and
one of Rindfleisch's professors at the time.

"That desire to be independent, it seemed to be part
of her sense of herself. It was very impressive."

Part of that, to Rindfleisch, meant finding a job
after she graduated in 1989 with a degree in social
work. But without a master's, not to mention
employers' reticence about her disability, it was
difficult to find work in the field. She volunteered
for the next six years at Columbia Hospital, greeting
visitors and staffing the information desk.

But she was restless, both to move out of her parents'
home and to find work.

"I knew, in my heart, I could handle a real job,"
Rindfleisch said.

The months before she moved out were strained for
mother and daughter as one pushed for her freedom and
the other fought to hang on.

"Mom and I were not getting along at that time, and
Dad had to be the mediator," Rindfleisch said in a
voice suggesting it's now water under the bridge.

"I said, 'Mom, you're not going to be around forever.
Don't you want me to see if I can do this on my own?'
"

But they were extremely close, and Jean was terrified
of what might lie ahead for her daughter.

"It was her caseworker who really made me think," Jean
Rindfleisch said. "She said, 'Anne needs her own
life,' not our life."

On her own
Since the day she moved out of her parents' home in
September 1995 and into a subsidized apartment,
Rindfleisch has set about living it.

She has an active social life, hitting the Monday
night bingo game with her friend, Jennifer Scheuber,
and still meeting college pal Ellen Prebish for an
occasional Admirals game.

Though it's true Rindfleisch is almost always upbeat,
she wouldn't be human if she didn't have down moments.

"Sure, she gets frustrated," said Prebish. "But Anne's
like me. We talk about the down times when they're
happening, but when it's over, it's over."

"She's got a spirit that just doesn't quit," said
Scheuber, who first met Rindfleisch when she worked
for her as a home health aide.

On the job, she's just as impressive.

In a small office at the Burlington Coat store,
Rindfleisch is busy preparing the day's reports. Using
a mouth stick - a dowel with a rubber tube on one side
and pointed eraser on the other - she busily inputs
the day's shipments. At 42 words a minute, she's
sometimes too fast for the aging computer.

Using her shoulder to steer her wheelchair,
Rindfleisch shifts to another part of her desk. There,
she uses the mouth stick to pull a contract from a
stack of files, positions the pages in the stapler
with her teeth, then pushes with her chin.

When the phone rings, she lifts it between her chin
and ear in a single motion so swift, she laughingly
likens it to a karate move.

A newly hired assistant performs what few functions
she can't, such as pulling reports off the printer.
But beyond that, she's not one to seek help.

"She's extremely independent," said Andrea La Croix,
district manager for the discount retailer. "She's
phenomenal. She does an outstanding job for us."

A lasting impression
It was in Goodwill Industries' Business Careers
program that Rindfleisch learned the workplace skills
she uses today. And it was there she left an
impression so profound it touched one woman to the
core and drew international attention to Rindfleisch's
life's accomplishments.

"It's not unusual in my job to work with people
dealing with pain and discomfort," said Cheryl Axford,
director of vocational services for Goodwill, who
nominated Rindfleisch for the award.

"But this woman is anything but. To think she'll never
know what it's like to scratch her own nose, to shift
her weight in her chair and never grumble - never - it
puts your whole life in perspective."

Though it is part of her job to nominate a Goodwill
graduate each year, it's clear in the breaking of her
voice that the 2001 nomination was different for
Axford.

"This happens to you only once in a life, when you
meet someone who really reaches in and touches your
soul," Axford said. "Anne is that person in my life."


 Your life is what you put into it. 

- Anne Rindfleisch 


Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on May 14,
2001.





__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To join/leave, use the form at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/#options
This list is archived at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/archive.html