Jessica Slice is the author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World.
In the course of just one day, I transitioned from living a life in which I dictated the terms of my existence, to living a life with terms dictated to me by physical need. Instead of heading out for meals with friends and long morning runs, I had to adjust to spending most of the day at home, responsive to mercurial bodily demands.
This could easily be the description of becoming a new mother, but it’s actually my story of my becoming disabled at 28. Now that I’m a parent, I’ve found that these two identities – mother and disabled – are in fact linked, and a broader recognition of their overlap would not only improve disability inclusion, but also allow disabled wisdom to guide all parents.
For me, the transition to disability was not easy – while I became disabled suddenly, it took years for me to admit it, and still more years to accept it. What I didn’t know at the time is that my adjustment would help ease my future transition to parenthood.
I became a parent six years after becoming disabled. When my newborn demanded a slow and still life, I was ready for it; her evolving needs reminded me of my own. My daughter is 8 years old now, and instead of needing her mom to have the patience for thrice-daily contact naps, she now needs a mom with the patience to listen to every word of the Wicked soundtrack, over and over. My disability prepared me for both.
Becoming a parent requires building a relationship with disability, even if most people don’t notice this connection. When I wrote Unfit Parent, I mostly spoke with disabled parents, but I also interviewed nondisabled parents to help me flag differences between the two groups.
There is one interview I think about a lot: One of the non-disabled interviewees mentioned that after her first child was born, she had to bring him back to the hospital every other day for the first couple weeks. The hospital was a half-mile walk from her apartment, and travelling by foot was the most practical option. The walks were excruciating. Labour had left her with stabbing back and pelvic pain. Her mental health suffered during those early weeks, and the pain compounded her sense of hopelessness.
I am a disabled mother who uses a wheelchair, and as my interviewee recounted the walks, I kept thinking: Why did no one suggest a wheelchair?
A pervasive societal fear of disability prevents new parents from seeing how the line between disabled and non-disabled blurs in parenthood. Not only are bodies that give birth disabled (at least temporarily) by the process, but I’d argue that babies are some of the purest examples of disability.
There are a few ways of defining a disabled person: someone whose physical, mental or emotional limitations impact their daily life; someone for whom society is insufficiently accessible; or, my preference – someone who benefits from the disability-rights movement. Every one of these definitions applies to someone who has just given birth, as well as to infants.
The great irony is that disabled people are often excluded from parenthood. The exclusion takes overt and covert forms. For example, there are many playgrounds and schools that I cannot enter with my children. But my erasure is not only architectural. It wasn’t until I wrote a picture book that my kids saw families like ours represented. And most critically, disabled parents in Canada are far more likely to lose custody in the child welfare system.
Instead of being excluded, parents like me should be welcomed into the fold. We have vital wisdom to offer, and experience dealing with unpredictable bodies and convoluted medical systems. We are experts in adaptive equipment. We know how to rest and ask for help.
Many of the most difficult aspects of parenthood are the result of a widespread fear of disability. Parenthood forces us to admit that we lack control and that our capacities are limited. That reckoning can threaten our carefully built façade of safety. But if, as a society, we were to address our fear of disability, admitting that all bodies have needs and that physical limitations don’t equate to a worse life, the shift to parenthood would be less jarring.
I also interviewed Dr. Jess Elana Aaron, a single mother by choice with greatly reduced use of the muscles in her limbs. Dr. Aaron relies on her mouth for most tasks, and when her son was born, the help she had lined up to ease the transition fell through. But disability had prepared her for navigating the impossible. She had been problem solving for decades. She invented a bed-and-swaddle contraption that she could operate with her mouth. She had shelf-stable bottles ready within reach. When I asked her about those early days, alone in bed with a newborn, she said she looks back on that time fondly. It was a time “to get to know each other,” she recounted.
Parenthood can be gruelling. For those non-disabled parents who have relied on a generally accessible world, the shift can feel particularly jarring. But instead of shying away from the new proximity to neediness, it should be embraced. Disabled parents like me are here, eager to be included, and ready to guide you down the paths we’ve already forged.