SPORTS 'N SPOKES

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True Grit

Despite facing many obstacles, Joanne MacDonald met life's challenges head on and embraced success.

"I love to win," says Joanne MacDonald, one of the best female wheelchair athletes in Canadian history.

Although she claims it's just that simple, anyone who knows her will tell you there's far more to her success than a competitive spirit.

MacDonald has always been a scrappy competitor and survivor, but survival was never enough. In 1952, she was born with spina bifida and abandoned at the hospital.

"I can only imagine how difficult it was for her," MacDonald says about her mother's decision. "The stigma of having a child out of wedlock.... She was young, came from a very large family, and struggled. She didn't feel comfortable bringing a baby back home, certainly a baby with a disability. Bringing back another mouth to feed just wasn't possible."

MacDonald spent her early life in orphanages, foster homes, and hospitals, where she underwent a series of operations. Although her mother abandoned her, she refused to give her up for adoption.

"I think that was her way of keeping that little link there to check in from time to time to see how I was doing," MacDonald says. "If she had given me up, she would have lost all ties."

As a result, MacDonald became a foster child. At age 6 she was placed with John and Hilda St. Croix of St. Mary's Bay—a village of 400 people on the east coast of Newfoundland—and she knew she had come home. She lived with her foster parents until she was 18, and still thinks of John and Hilda as her mother and father.

Roots

MacDonald's biological mother died in 1994, ironically just a month before her beloved foster mother passed away.

"I didn't know my biological mother died until six months later," MacDonald remembers. "It just seemed so symbolic, losing both parents within a month of each other. There was no opportunity to connect with one, but I was grieving the loss of someone I knew quite well."

The identity of her biological father remains a mystery.

School was no picnic for MacDonald partly because she spent so much time in the hospital undergoing and recovering from various surgeries related to her disability. The hospital was more than 100 miles from home in the capital, St. John's. In typical MacDonald fashion, she took it all in stride.

When she did go to the one-room school in her village, the nuns who ran it suspected her of using her disability as an excuse to goof off. MacDonald and the authorities fought ongoing battles.

"It was tough," she says. Things improved when she entered a newly built high school, but not entirely. She was discouraged from participating in sports because she might get hurt.

In hindsight, MacDonald comments, "Having a disability and being a foster kid, I didn't really need another reason to be removed from my classmates."

For the most part, her classmates treated her like anyone else. A stigma existed, but it had nothing to do with her disability.

"There were more issues with being a foster child than having a disability," says MacDonald.

Check out the complete article in the May 2010 S'NS.

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