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9:31am July 12, 2013

➸ The Improbable Girl.: I should be sleeping, but how about disabled feels instead?

toomanystarstocount:

I just started babysitting a little five-year-old girl whose parents pulled her out of a bad day care situation (I could make a whole post about how I want to punch the teachers who told her she was bad - not her behavior. Her.) and it’s been a long week.

She’s having trouble adjusting to her new…


I understand the fear. And I’m not trying to minimize it. But here’s one thought I had.

Able-bodied parents have limits too. They have situations they could never save their child in. They feel horrible when they can’t – whether those limits are physical, or emotional such as freezing up in a dangerous situation. But every single person has a different set of physical and emotional limits than every other person. No two are exactly identical. And even from one day, one year, one moment to the next our limits aren’t identical.

I have been in situations where I haven’t been able to save people from things due to being disabled, to having a different set of limits than the range that is considered the norm. Sometimes people were okay, sometimes they weren’t.

But my friend told me something once when I was crying about it.  It’s her advice to me, so you can take it or leave it. But she said…

“It’s okay if you are upset about what happened, or might have happened, to someone else. But if you’re beating yourself up for being disabled? Stop it right now. You have limits. Everyone has limits. If you didn’t choose those limits, it’s not your fault. And if it’s not your fault, you have no reason to make yourself feel terrible about not having done something you could never have done. Feeling terrible about yourself won’t save anyone’s life, won’t bring anyone back, won’t help anyone, including you. So stop, think about something else, feel bad about what happened if you need to, but don’t you dare beat yourself up for having a disability you never chose. If you hadn’t been there at all, it would have been even worse for everyone, you wouldn’t have even been able to call for help if something happened, so think about that instead.”

(Not going to discuss what it was for me, because it’s not the point, but thought I’d pass on her advice in case it does you any good. Honestly I think any children you have or may have later would be lucky to have someone who cares so much, and not being able to save your kids because of limitations is something even nondisabled parents have to grapple with.  That the limitations are different doesn’t make it feel any different to them.)