5:59pm November 5, 2014

➸ If Only, Oh If Only (Mel Baggs, 2010)

An old post about how I don’t and have never seen my disabled friends, as opposed to how their paernts often see them.

I have never mourned the existence of someone the first time I met them. (Or after that for that matter.)
I have never grieved that someone was not the normal person I expected and hoped for. Not even for a little bit. Not ever.
I have never “had to come to terms with” the fact that someone I knew was born different.
I have n##ever had any urge to commiserate with anyone else over these sorts of things.
I do not look at a person and divide them artificially into the “normal” parts of them that I find tolerable and the “abnormal” parts that I find unbearable and tragic.
I do not look at my friends, compare them to other people their own age, and think how horrible it is that I don’t have the good fortune of experiencing my friends hitting all the ‘typical’ milestones for their age group, there is no sense of loss here.
These ways of thinking are just utterly and beautifully absent.
It’s right that they’re absent. It’s wrong when they’re present. I keep hearing we have to allow for the fact that it’s only natural for people (you know, real people, which I’m not) to grieve this part of our existence. How it’s just wrong, downright insensitive, to want more from people.
Want to know why I and many others I know get nervous about reading blogs by nondisabled parents of disabled people? Even many of the “positive” ones? Stuff like this (paraphrases of stuff I’ve really heard in dozens of variations for each one):
“I go into his room every night while he is sleeping. And he looks so normal. And my heart breaks wondering who he could have been if it weren’t for [insert condition here].”
“It hurts so much every time I see normal children her age. I realize how many milestones she hasn’t hit. How far behind she is. And she may never catch up…”
“Other people will grow and change, but my son will be left behind. Other people become adults, but my son will always be a child.”
“My daughter has to live in a group home because she lacks the skills necessary to live on her own.”
“They said my son would never walk, talk, or take care of himself. And now he’s done all those and more. I am so proud of him.”1 [Please go to the original post and read the third comment before blowing up at me for including this one.]
“I overflow with love and pride every time my daughter looks me in the eye, gives me a hug, or uses her words. I would not know how valuable such things are if she didn’t struggle so hard to accomplish them.”
“Life with my son is bittersweet. I love him more than life itself but I know the things he will never do and it makes me sad.”
“I am constantly having to fight to pull my daughter out of her own world and into the real world. If it weren’t for me, she would be lost.”
I could go on, but I won’t. All of these sort of comments seem to be commonplace among nondisabled parent bloggers. When I question them people tell me they can’t help their feelings. But the fact is that without certain disability prejudices, they wouldn’t feel that way. And there are right and wrong ways to write about prejudice-based feelings. The right way puts them in the context of ableism. The wrong way simply serves to reinforce ableism in readers. And for disabled readers who could actually be harmed by the prejudices behind the feelings, the wrong way can feel like the twisting of the knife.