Disability

Standards of Care

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:45 -0400

The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.

The Empty Room Inside Each of Us

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Crumb is always right, always the one telling the story, always the one who turns the drab, lonesome plains they call home into a world that’s dramatic and necessary.

Formed Otherwise

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

There’s a presumption that to raise a child with disabilities makes you brave. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t always a stellar mother, either. But I studied my daughter as if she were an ancient text to see what was beneath the chatter and the rage

The Feeding

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Some leeches have two jaws. Others have three. Some have teeth on their tongues. There are protective leeches who hover over their eggs, and leeches who carry their newborns in pouches like tiny kangaroos.

Our Fraying Hearts

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

I have a sense of the drama people want to hear about, but most days our ER is filled with abdominal pain and vomiting—nothing like what you’re accustomed to seeing on TV.

Rise

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

I wasn’t about to tell Simon what happened. Buddy Sikes was one of the popular kids. Simon wouldn’t understand. Not because of his differences, but because he was still at the age where a clear line separated right from wrong.

Home Invasions

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Still, I hadn’t counted on real, live rats. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard them before,” said Rat Guy #1, as he came to be known. “From the looks of it they’ve been here a while.”

The Children's Wing

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Other parents see our little girl running up and down the hall, or performing a dance in the playroom, or climbing onto a stool to get the Funny Bunny game from the closet, and they ask why we are here. I have told the story so many times to so many different doctors that I’m beginning to wonder if I’m keeping the details straight. Was it four in the morning or six? What woke us—the trembling and shaking, or the lack of breathing, or the choking sounds?

Wild Animals

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Swimming with whale sharks, hearing a mountain lion, refusing to eat a snake

Getting Dressed

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Sleeping in uniform, layering against the cold, wearing your spouse’s jeans

Guardians

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

His inability to tell me when he’s sick, the most baseline, possibly the easiest thing to express, means he isn’t expressing a million other needs that are harder to pin down: If his shoes are too tight. If his ear hurts. Once, my son was walking funny. When I looked at his foot, he had a bee stinger sticking out from his toe. Being a parent of a disabled child means I can’t assume anything. I am taking care of his needs, and if I miss a need he can’t express, I’m failing him. I’m always failing him.

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Chair/Body/Home

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:05:00 -0400

What would it take for me to no longer want to leave my body? What would it take for me to see my body as my home? I don’t know, really, except perhaps more exposure to different ideas about disability, different ideas about beauty and worth.

On Seeing A Sex Surrogate

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 04:00:00 -0400

Pounding the keys with my mouth stick, I wrote in my journal as quickly as I could about my experience, then switched off the computer and tried to nap. But I couldn’t. I was too happy. For the first time, I felt glad to be a man.

Preparations

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 04:00:00 -0400

You can prepare for some things. / Others fall on you like / meteors ripping open the sky.

Took Us All Like We Was His

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Before we was married, we rented a little townhouse in Dallas. My girls was with us. They from my first marriage. Nate come to us when my baby girl was barely a year old. He latched on and took us all like we was his, and I didn’t see all the love in that.

The Stray

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0500

One winter, years ago, a stray cat lived under my rear deck. He was long and skinny and had a tattered gray coat, a whip tail, a block head, and a set of elephant nuts that hung low off his hind end. He survived by eating scraps of leftover food my mother threw to the birds. The sight of him disgusted me.

Perseverance

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500

The North Tower of the World Trade Center, the Kona Ironman race in Hawaii, a four-door Plymouth Reliant

The R-Word

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

When he diagnosed my three-month-old, Fiona, with a chromosomal disorder, the redheaded, cherubic medical geneticist did not use the phrase “mentally retarded” — thank God, or the gods of rhetoric, or just the politically correct medical school the young doctor had attended.

Almost Unendurable Beauty

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

The plastic prescription vial contains thirty doses. I press the cap down, twist it counterclockwise, and shake a cylindrical pill into my hand. It is an ugly gray, like dryer lint, like newly poured concrete, like a bullet. I know my daughter will notice this.

Beyond Their Years

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400

We say children are gifted when their intellectual ability is advanced beyond their age. A four-year-old girl who can pass all the items on an IQ test that an eight-year-old is expected to be able to do would obtain an IQ score in the 200 range. Children who are developmentally advanced are out of sync with their peers, and also out of sync with the expectations of teachers and parents, which leads to vulnerability. They need individualized education and counselors who understand how to work with these children.

Anything For Love

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0500

When I was eight, I was so obsessed with Erich Segal’s novel Love Story that I memorized the first few paragraphs and recited them at every opportunity: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she loved Mozart. And Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”

Teaching My Daughter To Walk

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

If my daughter had been born to the Ashanti people in Ghana, she would have been abandoned at the riverbank.

excerpted from
Still Here

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Recently, a friend said to me, “You’re more human since the stroke than you were before.” This touched me profoundly. What a gift the stroke has given me, to finally learn that I don’t have to renounce my humanity in order to be spiritual — that I can be both witness and participant, both eternal spirit and aging body.

What I Didn’t Do

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

I never called her back, the woman / with the two babies born just like mine: / girls who couldn’t crawl or talk, / could barely smile, who lay there, / bundled in flowered dresses, staring / at the ceiling.

Eyes

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Organ donation, birdcalls, lasagna

We Are Not Worth More, They Are Not Worth Less

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

I think of myself as a recovering white male, recovering from my early conditioning about how to be successful. The value system I was raised with dehumanized me to the point that I followed an order to travel nine thousand miles to participate in destroying another people. It’s incredible that I could do that, and without really thinking much about it. That’s why I wrote the book — to understand how it was so easy for me to do that.

Underneath The Armor

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Four months into their seven-month tour, the mostly nineteen- and twenty-year-old marines at Patrol Base Fires in Sangin, Afghanistan, had seen enough violence to permanently line their boyish faces. Two of their platoon’s men had been killed by improvised explosive devices [IEDs], one of them blown literally in two.

Death Or Glory

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We went deeper into the ocean, cold water wrapping us, white foam clinging to our skin. I carried your soft, floppy body, your sweaty cheek resting against my shoulder, your right eye — the good one — wide and staring up at my face. I felt my way along the sandy bottom, trying to step lightly where there were stones, until finally, struggling with your weight, I began to kick so that we were both floating, heads bobbing above the waterline, beyond the waves to where the water grayed and frigid sea pulled at us.

Two Days (Or, The Joys Of Being On Television)

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I didn’t want to go, but my fiancée, Cora, insisted it would be good for me. She and I hadn’t been apart for more than a few hours at a time since I’d left the hospital, where my left arm had been removed after a car accident. Now I was to spend the weekend at a crippled-children’s camp.

Disability

Standards of Care

The Empty Room Inside Each of Us

Formed Otherwise

The Feeding

Our Fraying Hearts

Rise

Home Invasions

The Children's Wing

Wild Animals

Getting Dressed

Guardians

Home Sick

Chair/Body/Home

On Seeing A Sex Surrogate

Preparations

Took Us All Like We Was His

The Stray

Perseverance

The R-Word

Almost Unendurable Beauty

Beyond Their Years

Anything For Love

Teaching My Daughter To Walk

excerpted fromStill Here

What I Didn’t Do

Eyes

We Are Not Worth More, They Are Not Worth Less

Underneath The Armor

Death Or Glory

Two Days (Or, The Joys Of Being On Television)

excerpted from
Still Here