I’ve tried to write this a dozen times, and every time I do, I realize that the vast majority of you are going to tune out, perhaps even close the browser window, when you read the next two words: Down syndrome. Disability makes us uncomfortable. Whatever lip service we pay to valuing those with special [...]
The answer is, yes. We knew the time had arrived when every billboard between home and southern Illinois flashed the word “pregnancy” or “baby” at us, only to morph into Philosophy or Body Shop upon closer inspection. Baby number four has been on our radar for the last six months. We’ve turned the question over [...]
We took three days away, my husband and I, on a trip for two. Our first in five years of parenthood. We flew to Tampa and started our weekend with a big fight in the car. (That wasn’t what you were expecting, was it?) Once we got that out of our systems we settled into [...]
He lay there on the floor, his wheelchair behind him. His face was red with exertion and his body contorted from the disease that ravaged his body. We didn’t know how long he’d been lying there. We had been shopping and thought that leaving him alone would be ok.
I grew up without health care. My parents did not have money for health insurance, and with their strong opposition to accepting special help from the government, we simply went without health care even during times when we qualified for State programs. My father would tell us children that we believed in “assurance” rather than [...]
In the mornings, in the evenings, in the hot, hot afternoons, I have been standing barefoot and apron-beclad in my kitchen, canning. This act, in this time, is especially fraught; while on one hand it is viewed as an act so radical it’s at the center of a few back-to-the-land-style movements — Radical Homemaking, the [...]
When I was a young child there was a chart on our freezer. It looked a lot like a Shoots-n-Ladders board and had magnets shaped like cars. The idea was that for each pre-reading or reading step completed the child would get to move a car forward a space. Sadly for the children, there were [...]