What Is Disabled Motherhood Like?
Photo courtesy of Rebekah Taussig
When I was in high school, my teacher asked the class to carry around dolls for a week as a glimpse into parenthood. Everyone knew this was silly, since dolls are much easier than newborns, but we still cradled them on top of our notebooks and resisted the urge to stick them in our lockers during lunch (an automatic fail). When the experiment was over, and we had turned in our essays about the experience, my teacher called me to his desk.
In the essay I had turned in, I wrote that I most likely wanted kids in the future but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to have them. He looked at me and gruffly whispered, “Allowed to?” with my words resting in his hand. I nodded. Then he said, “Don’t let anyone tell you what you’re allowed to do with your one life. I think you’d make a great mom someday.”
As a woman with cerebral palsy, the question marks I’ve had around motherhood have existed for as long as I can remember. I don’t have any pop culture references of an effortlessly calm disabled mom telling her child that it’ll all be better in the morning, or even everyday observations of visibly disabled moms running errands while their kids ask for cookies in the background. So, when I saw Rebekah Taussig, author of Sitting Pretty, open up on Instagram about her experience with pregnancy and motherhood as a woman with a disability, it was like seeing a path forward that my teacher had once assured me was there.
