FOr last year, my husband David was on parental leave with our second baby. We live in Canada and he took the 61 weeks at his disposal. When our first child was born in 2017, David returned to work the next day (we were host parents).
During the past year, I brought out three pounds, so David was the main provision of care for our two children. This division of household labor has strengthened a long -standing insecurity that I have as a disabled mother: that I am not considered a real parent. That it is almost more credible than I am author than a mother.
Don’t get me wrong – I like my job and I feel extremely grateful. But as a disabled woman, my own needy body and my dependence on care makes me invisible in the stereotypical portrait of the all-back and endless mother. It seems likely, however, that even mothers that correspond to this image are crushed by expectations.
When our first child was a newborn baby, I joined a support group for the new mothers in Oakland, where we lived. There were about ten who met us on Wednesday, all with babies on our towers. A common refrain from the rest of the group was a shared anxiety concerning the modification of identities. They wanted to make sure they did not become “only mothers”. This concern was rooted both in the way the world saw them and also how they saw themselves – a fearing that their other interests, achievements and feelings could be subsumed by their babies.
Their feelings are valid. But while I was trying to come back, I was delighted with the idea that someone would consider me a mom, even if she escapes from all the other parts of me. Eight years later, this desire has not decreased. I find myself trying to prove that I am a mother. Instead of moving away from my children in professional contexts, I reorigate them into conversations – reducing their sleep, their diseases and their milestones. I feel a feeling of pride when I reserve visits to the doctor or plan calls with teachers. Being a mom feels like a boastful.
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I do not have a traditional vision of maternity as well as the ultimate vocation – people should also feel empowered to the parent or not. But, as a disabled woman, I never forget how the world considers my capacity to parent. I can count on the one hand the number of times I have attended a disabled parent in books, programs and films. We are almost entirely absent from the media.
It is not only a lack of representation that makes it difficult to claim my identity as a mother; In the majority of states in America, it is legal to force a disabled person for force against their will. People with disabilities can be subject to surgeries that we do not want, just so that children do not have us as parents. These laws are neither obsolete nor ignored. The most recent law was adopted in 2019.
In 42 states, disability is a ground for the kidnapping of the child. Child protection services randomly follow disability as a status. However, even with insufficient files, we know that, at least, child protection services are 23 to 63% more likely to determine that a disabled parent is abusive, despite any evidence that parents with disabilities are more likely to mistreat their children. Parents with intellectual disability are facing elimination rates up to 70 to 80%, even if IQ is not correlated with parental capacity. I spoke to a lawyer who represents disabled parents who fight for guard, and she thinks that almost all cases of withdrawal of children involve a form of parental disability.
For many disabled people, the “mom” is an ambitious identity – whether seen in legislation or our daily life. In each school to which my elder attended, I could not access a part of the place where she spent her days: the classroom, the office or the assembly room. My eight -year -old child goes to his days in our city, highlighting the places where I cannot go to my wheelchair.
The world clearly indicates that people with disabilities should not parent and that we have limited rights, and I have metabolized these messages. Despite the writing of a whole book on the reasons why people with disabilities have parental wisdom to offer all parents, I always feel the need to prove my good faith as a mom.
If I meet a parent of the park and they call me “K”, it is the greatest compliment. Of course, I am an author and a friend and a person with preferences, but the world does not constantly threaten these parts of me. I spent my life seeing people with disabilities in the arts and sciences. Underrepresented, of course, but present.
I recently looked at Night machine (For an obstinate reason, I avoided reading it for years) and I think it is addressed, brilliantly, the structural and cultural forces which have pushed many women in roles of reluctant caregivers without adequate support. In this document, the main character, called “mother”, fights with the thankless monotony of parenting and the loss of his old identity as an artist. Her rage simmer until she becomes so wild that she begins to transform into dogs. It is only when she begins to develop a tail that she can find her way to her.
Many mothers have experienced a cathartic version of reading or look Night machineBut I couldn’t do myself feel he. Despite the dark illustration of her life, I found myself a little jealous. The sleeping woman with sleeping eyes felt, for me, ambitious. Of course, many people have enviable difficulties by others. The social waters that I swim to constantly remember that maternity is a club to which women like me are not invited.
Parents with disabilities like me have chosen our way, redefine the genre and nevertheless find themselves outside. But disabled parenting actually offers practices that can make parenthood more human for everyone: accepting our faults, relying on the community and rejecting consumerism. Despite my sincere belief that disabled wisdom contains solutions for all parents, I always find myself wishing that I am just another harassed mother in the line of carpooling.
I want to be considered a “mother” of the capital and I want to believe that I am. But at the heart of my dissatisfaction is a shared experience with all the other parents – the feeling that we are Does not correspond to the close prescriptions of the company’s WHO will allow us to be. My exclusion was born from a feeling felt by many, disabled and not: invisibility. If a disabled mother like me can be fully witness, then the range of what a real mother can look like.
This is what maternity is like me: when we leave the house, my elder helps put my baby on my knees in my electric wheelchair. I loop it using a velcro strap a friend sewn for me. As I go down the plywood ramp in front of our house, my elder returns to close and lock the door. The baby’s body presses in my painful ribs, but I support the sensation because its head on my sternum looks like peace. When we stop to buy a cookie, there is a step outside without a ramp, then I hit the window and agitates a merchant. My elder becomes a sulky because she hates seeing me excluded. It is silent during a house pâté. We stop so that she plays in the broken exercise equipment in a neighboring corner, which, for any reason, is her “favorite playground”. I receive a wave of dizziness and breathe it. My baby mumbles and drool flows them in his chin from his new molar. I give it a fruit pocket.
I will not bathe them tonight; David Will. I can’t look at the bathtub. I will not cook their dinners; David Will. I don’t mash something for them. If they wake up at night, they know that David will be the only one to help. Tonight, my elder and I will play a strategy game with bug tiles. My baby will kiss my cheek, my slobbery and my mouth open – a gift marked by a thousand tiny miracles.
