Browse Topics

Guardians

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

Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About

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

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.

Took Us All Like We Was His

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

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

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

The R-Word

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

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.