Mobile Temple

“We are all mobile temples of God,” I read this morning from Father Richard Rohr, and then I took the mobile temples that are my two daughters and the mobile temple that is myself, and mobilized all three of us …

You Won’t Read This Story in the News: A Tale of Kindergarten Inclusion

Unless you’re a hermit on a mountain somewhere, cut off from all news, you might be getting the impression that the world could soon end, or will for certain end (possibly Tuesday), or maybe even has already ended. I don’t …

Teaching Disability Studies to a 3-Year-Old

“Momma! These glasses are broken.” The three-year-old is trying to unfurl those black plastic eye-doctor sunglasses and spread them across her face. “No, they aren’t,” my husband says. He wore them home from his appointment the other day after his …

The One Thing I Still Mourn: Notes on a Five-Year Anniversary

When Fiona was three and a half months old, my husband and I received a phone call. I was in the living room, zipping up a suitcase for our first flight with a baby, counting the short hour or two …

Fiona Writes Fiction (or Why AAC-Using Kids Need Word Play)

It’s not easy to find an AAC consultant in this country. Anyone who’s looking for one knows this. AAC stands for “Adaptive and Augmentative Communication,” and it’s precisely what Fiona uses when she tells me (with her talker) that she wants …

Rules for Writing about Fiona

Every few weeks I stumble across an article arguing that parents shouldn’t publicly write about their kids. Some of these articles are written by parents who once wrote about their kids but have since changed their minds. Some of these …

On Radical Acceptance (& Not Fixing Your Kid)

There’s a small town in Belgium named Geel (pronounced hale with a throaty, Germanic H). By 1930, a quarter of its residents were mentally ill. If you know about Geel, you know this was not because something lurked in the …

Noun Lover: An AAC Update

I’ve always loved nouns. As a kid, I loved the Richard Scarry books that name every freaking noun on a page. I loved putting my finger on the objects—comb, brush, bowl—and saying the nouns. I love the lines in Genesis where …

I Am Not My Child’s Therapist

Almost five years have passed since the day I labored in a hospital tub and birthed the tiny baby that a midwife immediately called Peanut. We named that baby Fiona and we cradled her unfathomably small, four-pound-twelve-ounce body. In the …

On the “Not Proud/Proud” Moments of Disability Parenting

Today, after my husband got Fiona dressed for school, she plopped herself on the living room floor and flipped through a book. “Time to eat, Fee,” my husband said. He’s the one who usually fries her eggs, and she’s usually …