Playing Patty Cake With One Hand
I am standing over the changing table. Six week old Liat, my first child, looks up at me with her dazzling blue eyes. She cycles her skinny legs and windmills her arms. When I finally succeed in getting a diaper under her bottom, she kicks it off. As I struggle to change her diaper, I break into a sweat.
Six years earlier, I was a healthy twenty-three year old when overnight I became a disabled person. I crossed that line because a capillary deep in my brain ruptured in an Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM). I collapsed on a New York City street near my office and awoke after five days in a coma during which the doctors tried to control the bleed. My left arm lay by my side, bloated and inert as a corpse washed up from the ocean. My left leg could not support my weight. After months in rehab, I did learn to walk again, slowly and with a pronounced limp. I saw myself reflected in the fear and worse the pity in the eyes of others. People spoke to me in a loud slow voice. Glimpsing myself in the mirror, the old schoolyard insult, “spazz” came to mind. My identity was shaken to the core. I no longer felt like the self-confident pretty girl who entered Wellesley College at seventeen and graduated from Columbia Law School at twenty-three. Every day, my vanity died a thousand deaths. Things that had been easy, like dressing myself, became hard. Since the stroke, I have intense fatigue that is not a “normal” kind of tired, but a feeling as if my brain is flickering off with static like a broken radio.
A year and a half after the stroke, against my doctor’s advice, I returned to work as an attorney at a large City agency. Law is a demanding profession. A normal work day was exhausting for me. Most days, I stumbled home and went to bed at nine o’clock. I threw myself into my work and my achievements were recognized with a promotion. Six months later, I married my boyfriend who had been steadfast and supportive throughout my ordeal. Soon, we decided to have a child. I knew taking care of a baby with one arm would be difficult but I planned to work and have a full time housekeeper. My physical therapist put me in touch with a generous colleague who allowed me to practice with her baby, a placid dumpling, but nothing could have truly prepared me for the overwhelming task ahead.
Liat, was a bright eyed sprite, thin and active. As first time parents, everything the baby did, every gesture, every gurgle, was amazing to us. As Don said, it was if we had been given the most fantastic gift and the hardest job at once. Though scared I would drop her, I learned to hold and position her for nursing but I broke out in a sweat struggling to keep her still enough to get a diaper around her skinny little bottom. I dreaded the times when I was alone with her and might have to change her.
I felt I did not deserve Liat. What kind of mother is afraid to be alone with her baby? What kind of mother cannot change her baby’s diaper? After a few weeks, Don had to return to work which meant I would be alone until the babysitter arrived at 8:30 a.m. When Liat was a month old, I resolved that I would not be defeated by a six pound person. The next time Don went out, I picked Liat up and looked her straight in the eye, "You are a baby" I said in a firm voice, “babies wear diapers." I continued the eye contact as I put her on the changing table and said, “Now hold still and let mommy change your diaper.” She sensed my determination and let me change her. I taught her to lift her behind so that I could slide the diaper underneath. She was only a few months old when she learned to reach for my good arm.
I returned to my job when Liat was three months old. I was not ready to leave her, but the New York city government agency where I worked had a strict maternity leave policy and I did not want to lose the job I had tried to keep after the stroke. As I sat in my office, trying to concentrate on my portion of the pressing legal issues faced by the City of New York that day, I felt as if I were missing a body part, but I knew I couldn't manage at home without help. How could I safely bathe an infant? What if there were an emergency? Without my salary, we couldn't afford the assistance I needed.
My first husband, Don, was both a hard-working lawyer and an exceptionally devoted father who competently did everything from diapering to dressing and bathing. Still, there were often two or three hours from when I got home at five thirty or six and when he got home at eight or nine. The housekeeper went off duty when I walked in the door and though nearly overcome with exhaustion, I faced an active baby who needed me. One day, my housekeeper was upset and bursting to tell me about the woman down the hall who had approached her and said, “Thank God that child has you. I thank God that I’m not like that if I was like that I wouldn’t have children.” Every time I saw this neighbor, her brow was furrowed in concern for my unfortunate child. Her cruel words haunted me as I wrestled with feelings of inadequacy. I didn’t understand then what I learned over many painful years, that when people behave in an insensitive manner to the disabled it's an expression of their own fear and ignorance.
There were new challenges as Mommy and Me classes and the playground loomed. I envied the easy way the other mothers in Park Slope toted their babies in backpacks or slings. We attached a bar between the two handles of Liat’s stroller so that I could rest my left hand on it and push. Liat was a sociable baby who enjoyed Mommy and Me classes, where mothers sat in a circle with their babies on their laps and sang “the eensy weensy spider goes up the water spout.” with finger play and hand motions. It was hard for me to sit on the floor and impossible for me to clap hands. I felt embarrassed as I played one handed patty cake with my daughter. As I sang along to “The wheels on the bus go round and round,” I felt like an utter failure because my bus only had one wheel. It seemed as if the other mothers in the neighborhood looked away from me. Did they share the sentiments so cruelly voiced by my neighbor? I was too shy to join in their easy camaraderie. In retrospect, I realize that my close friends would have been supportive but I was too ashamed to share my self-doubt with them, so I kept up a façade. It has taken years and a certain maturity for me to learn that there is no point in trying to pretend that I am just like everyone else. My disability cannot be concealed and I only make my life more difficult and lonely if I try to hide it.
When Liat was seven months old, my mother, who had dropped in to see the baby, phoned me frantically at work. I raced home. Liat was listless and flushed. The covering doctor for the pediatrician had told my mother to calm down and bring the baby to the office in the morning. I lay Liat on the changing table. She screamed, arched her back, and thrust her legs out and an inch long blue lump protruded from her groin. I called the doctor, described the lump, and he again said to bring her by in the morning. “No,” I shouted, “We are going to the emergency room, now !” and slammed down the phone. Several terrifying hours later, the hospital physicians diagnosed an inguinal hernia requiring immediate emergency surgery. Without the surgery she could have died from strangulation of her intestines. My maternal instinct, which had told me to disregard the dismissive response from the covering doctor (who was mortified and later apologized) had saved my daughter’s life
After Liat’s surgery, I felt like a “true” mother but the storm of toddlerhood was coming. Liat had what her preschool teachers later tactfully termed a “forceful personality.” She was a strong independent child who, by the time she was two, preferred walking to use of a stroller. I am thankful that she always held my hand and did not run into the street. She was vivacious and charming but could throw quite a tantrum when she felt the occasion warranted. Like “the little girl, with one little curl, right in the middle of her forehead, when she was good she was very good, but when she was bad she was horrid.” I used to joke that I was looking for a military academy that would take two year olds.
There should be a plaque at the grocery store in Park Slope Brooklyn on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Berkeley Street to commemorate the tantrum that almost did us both in. After work, on a cold winter evening, I brought Liat to the store with me to buy a few things for dinner. She demanded to buy ice cream to eat outside on the stoop like we did in summer. I refused. She planted herself in front of the store and began to scream and cry at top volume. Passersby looked at us curiously or sympathetically, as it got darker and colder and my child continued to roar. With one arm, I did not have the option to pick her up and carry her home. If I had tried to drag her, I might have injured her. I took a few steps away, hoping she would follow. She held her ground. I felt frustration and, yes, anger. I took a few more steps and looked back but she didn’t budge. As night fell in Brooklyn, there she was, a small figure in a pink snowsuit, unwilling to give an inch, still howling at the top of her lungs. I turned around and we bought the ice cream, which I used as a lure to get her home, where I told her how angry I was.
In retrospect, I feel that this was not my finest hour as a parent. It was bad judgment to take her on foot to the store on a cold winter evening at the dinner hour. What if she had run or fallen into the street when I walked away? It would have been better to have let her eat ice cream on the stoop in the cold than to take the risk I did. The truth is, that night, I was tired and probably hungry, at the end of my tether, and I wanted to make a stand. When I think of the poor judgment, I exhibited that night, I have empathy for other woman who, faced with pressures of poverty or domestic violence, make mistakes that in some cases result in criminal prosecution.
By the time she was three, Liat outgrew her tantrums and morphed into a personable child who had comments and questions about everything from “Do cats go to heaven?” to “Why did God make bad people?” It was easier for me to manage a child than a baby or a toddler. As I sang, she danced down the street in front of me. She learned to let me rest if I was tired. Sometimes, we made it a game of doctor: “Pretend Mommy is sick and can’t move.” As I lay on the couch, she would examine me and render diagnoses such as “You’re sick.” However, the stress of my life as a working mother took a toll on my health and I got sick for real, with terrible digestive problems. I took some time off from work and was able to enjoy a few precious years as a stay at home mom, before financial necessity forced me back.
A friend told me about her mother who had polio and how, as a child, my friend believed she had caused her mother’s disability by spilling cream of wheat on her mother’s leg. I resolved that my children would never feel responsible for my disability. When I took Liat to preschool, her classroom was up three hefty flights of stairs. “It’s a race, “I would say with a laugh, forcing a smile as I dragged myself up the steps. She would have a big grin on her face as she ran past me. At the end, I would shrug and say, “I don’t know why she always wins.” When I was pregnant with my second child, the nice preschool teachers would come down to bring Liat up the stairs to the classroom while I sat contentedly in the lobby.
I was more nervous during my second pregnancy because I knew all too well the challenges ahead of me. Liat, then four and a half, was excited and we talked to the baby in my belly who we called “Miss Kick.” One day Liat said to me, “You and Daddy will die someday, but Miss Kick is forever.” In the delivery room, they put Miriam on my breast and she immediately began to nurse, then looked at me out of her big soulful brown eyes. My heart expanded to love another child.
Late that night, after I nursed, I stood with her nestled on my shoulder and looked in the mirror at the two of us, “It’s Miri and Mommy” I said. She looked at me like she understood. Nursing continued to go well and Miriam was soon a roly-poly baby. My mother bought me a stroller with big wheels and a bar across the front and we glided smoothly through the winter months. Even diaper changing went well. I sometimes wonder if Liat was harder to manage because she sensed my anxiety. We allowed Liat to handle the baby right from the start, with supervision of course. It wasn’t long before Liat, a capable five year old, began to act as a helper. At times, it seemed as if she thought she was Miriam’s mother or at least a co-parent. I wonder if Liat believed that I would not be able to take care of Miriam and felt the need to step into my role. In any event, Liat glowed with pride and excitement at every developmental step Miriam took. Perhaps this is why Miriam was walking at nine months and talking in sentences when she was a year old. Perhaps this is why Miriam’s “terrible twos” were almost nonexistent; Liat would not have tolerated any such rebellion. So intense was the closeness between them that when we once withheld dessert from Liat as a punishment, Miriam, who was only a few years old, in solidarity, refused to eat her own dessert.
Thirteen years in, my marriage to Don, forged by the catastrophic events of our twenties, which included not only my stroke but the deaths of both of our fathers, had become a prison to me. When Liat was eleven and Miriam was six, I asked him for a divorce. It was a painful decision but I knew I could not continue to grow as a person if we stayed together. I will be forever grateful that my first husband worked with me to have a civilized divorce” and that he continued to be an exceptionally loving, involved father. We agreed to stay in the same neighborhood and have on an equal shared custody arrangement. Liat, who was old enough to understand, was very angry at me for breaking up the marriage. Miriam missed me when she was with her father. Don and I both tried to give the children the support they needed. Though the divorce was my idea, I was lonely and frightened, with a range of new responsibilities from paying bills to unclogging stuffed toilets.
Nonetheless, these were fulfilling years for me as a mother. Once my children were school age, past physical dependency, I felt able to handle the emotional challenges of guiding them as they grew up. Maybe because I had difficulties as a “hands on” mother, I was well able to let go and allow them to develop as individuals without trying to impose my stamp on them as so many mothers do. They rode the subway everywhere from the age of twelve, chose and often shopped for their own clothes. Both my daughters grew up into independent and self-confident young women. The sisters are still extremely close, loyal and supportive of each other. Recently, Liat was ill and Miriam went to her apartment and cooked a refrigerator’s worth of food.
Yet I often wonder about the effect of my disability their formative years. On the most trivial level, did my children suffer from my inability to play patty cake properly? On a deeper level, did they feel they had to grow up quickly or God forbid take care of me? There are no answers to these questions. They are well-adjusted young women who say that they love me, yet still I worry that my limitations caused intangible psychic wounds.
Sometimes, when these doubts trouble me, I pull out a faded copy of an essay Miriam wrote in seventh grade, in which she wrote, “So when people see my mom’s arm hanging, they might think it is a little strange. They might feel pity or they might feel nothing at all. Well, I’m used to her arm. It seems perfectly normal to me, and sometimes I even forget that she ever had a stroke. When I was a little girl, I once said to my mom that if she hadn’t had the stroke she wouldn’t be Mommy—she would be someone else.” So, as much as this is the story of how I dealt with the obstacles posed by my disability, it is also the story of how my children adapted to me, how children make the best of the mother they have.
**
Published in Wordgathering, a journal of disability writing, March 2016.
I am standing over the changing table. Six week old Liat, my first child, looks up at me with her dazzling blue eyes. She cycles her skinny legs and windmills her arms. When I finally succeed in getting a diaper under her bottom, she kicks it off. As I struggle to change her diaper, I break into a sweat.
Six years earlier, I was a healthy twenty-three year old when overnight I became a disabled person. I crossed that line because a capillary deep in my brain ruptured in an Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM). I collapsed on a New York City street near my office and awoke after five days in a coma during which the doctors tried to control the bleed. My left arm lay by my side, bloated and inert as a corpse washed up from the ocean. My left leg could not support my weight. After months in rehab, I did learn to walk again, slowly and with a pronounced limp. I saw myself reflected in the fear and worse the pity in the eyes of others. People spoke to me in a loud slow voice. Glimpsing myself in the mirror, the old schoolyard insult, “spazz” came to mind. My identity was shaken to the core. I no longer felt like the self-confident pretty girl who entered Wellesley College at seventeen and graduated from Columbia Law School at twenty-three. Every day, my vanity died a thousand deaths. Things that had been easy, like dressing myself, became hard. Since the stroke, I have intense fatigue that is not a “normal” kind of tired, but a feeling as if my brain is flickering off with static like a broken radio.
A year and a half after the stroke, against my doctor’s advice, I returned to work as an attorney at a large City agency. Law is a demanding profession. A normal work day was exhausting for me. Most days, I stumbled home and went to bed at nine o’clock. I threw myself into my work and my achievements were recognized with a promotion. Six months later, I married my boyfriend who had been steadfast and supportive throughout my ordeal. Soon, we decided to have a child. I knew taking care of a baby with one arm would be difficult but I planned to work and have a full time housekeeper. My physical therapist put me in touch with a generous colleague who allowed me to practice with her baby, a placid dumpling, but nothing could have truly prepared me for the overwhelming task ahead.
Liat, was a bright eyed sprite, thin and active. As first time parents, everything the baby did, every gesture, every gurgle, was amazing to us. As Don said, it was if we had been given the most fantastic gift and the hardest job at once. Though scared I would drop her, I learned to hold and position her for nursing but I broke out in a sweat struggling to keep her still enough to get a diaper around her skinny little bottom. I dreaded the times when I was alone with her and might have to change her.
I felt I did not deserve Liat. What kind of mother is afraid to be alone with her baby? What kind of mother cannot change her baby’s diaper? After a few weeks, Don had to return to work which meant I would be alone until the babysitter arrived at 8:30 a.m. When Liat was a month old, I resolved that I would not be defeated by a six pound person. The next time Don went out, I picked Liat up and looked her straight in the eye, "You are a baby" I said in a firm voice, “babies wear diapers." I continued the eye contact as I put her on the changing table and said, “Now hold still and let mommy change your diaper.” She sensed my determination and let me change her. I taught her to lift her behind so that I could slide the diaper underneath. She was only a few months old when she learned to reach for my good arm.
I returned to my job when Liat was three months old. I was not ready to leave her, but the New York city government agency where I worked had a strict maternity leave policy and I did not want to lose the job I had tried to keep after the stroke. As I sat in my office, trying to concentrate on my portion of the pressing legal issues faced by the City of New York that day, I felt as if I were missing a body part, but I knew I couldn't manage at home without help. How could I safely bathe an infant? What if there were an emergency? Without my salary, we couldn't afford the assistance I needed.
My first husband, Don, was both a hard-working lawyer and an exceptionally devoted father who competently did everything from diapering to dressing and bathing. Still, there were often two or three hours from when I got home at five thirty or six and when he got home at eight or nine. The housekeeper went off duty when I walked in the door and though nearly overcome with exhaustion, I faced an active baby who needed me. One day, my housekeeper was upset and bursting to tell me about the woman down the hall who had approached her and said, “Thank God that child has you. I thank God that I’m not like that if I was like that I wouldn’t have children.” Every time I saw this neighbor, her brow was furrowed in concern for my unfortunate child. Her cruel words haunted me as I wrestled with feelings of inadequacy. I didn’t understand then what I learned over many painful years, that when people behave in an insensitive manner to the disabled it's an expression of their own fear and ignorance.
There were new challenges as Mommy and Me classes and the playground loomed. I envied the easy way the other mothers in Park Slope toted their babies in backpacks or slings. We attached a bar between the two handles of Liat’s stroller so that I could rest my left hand on it and push. Liat was a sociable baby who enjoyed Mommy and Me classes, where mothers sat in a circle with their babies on their laps and sang “the eensy weensy spider goes up the water spout.” with finger play and hand motions. It was hard for me to sit on the floor and impossible for me to clap hands. I felt embarrassed as I played one handed patty cake with my daughter. As I sang along to “The wheels on the bus go round and round,” I felt like an utter failure because my bus only had one wheel. It seemed as if the other mothers in the neighborhood looked away from me. Did they share the sentiments so cruelly voiced by my neighbor? I was too shy to join in their easy camaraderie. In retrospect, I realize that my close friends would have been supportive but I was too ashamed to share my self-doubt with them, so I kept up a façade. It has taken years and a certain maturity for me to learn that there is no point in trying to pretend that I am just like everyone else. My disability cannot be concealed and I only make my life more difficult and lonely if I try to hide it.
When Liat was seven months old, my mother, who had dropped in to see the baby, phoned me frantically at work. I raced home. Liat was listless and flushed. The covering doctor for the pediatrician had told my mother to calm down and bring the baby to the office in the morning. I lay Liat on the changing table. She screamed, arched her back, and thrust her legs out and an inch long blue lump protruded from her groin. I called the doctor, described the lump, and he again said to bring her by in the morning. “No,” I shouted, “We are going to the emergency room, now !” and slammed down the phone. Several terrifying hours later, the hospital physicians diagnosed an inguinal hernia requiring immediate emergency surgery. Without the surgery she could have died from strangulation of her intestines. My maternal instinct, which had told me to disregard the dismissive response from the covering doctor (who was mortified and later apologized) had saved my daughter’s life
After Liat’s surgery, I felt like a “true” mother but the storm of toddlerhood was coming. Liat had what her preschool teachers later tactfully termed a “forceful personality.” She was a strong independent child who, by the time she was two, preferred walking to use of a stroller. I am thankful that she always held my hand and did not run into the street. She was vivacious and charming but could throw quite a tantrum when she felt the occasion warranted. Like “the little girl, with one little curl, right in the middle of her forehead, when she was good she was very good, but when she was bad she was horrid.” I used to joke that I was looking for a military academy that would take two year olds.
There should be a plaque at the grocery store in Park Slope Brooklyn on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Berkeley Street to commemorate the tantrum that almost did us both in. After work, on a cold winter evening, I brought Liat to the store with me to buy a few things for dinner. She demanded to buy ice cream to eat outside on the stoop like we did in summer. I refused. She planted herself in front of the store and began to scream and cry at top volume. Passersby looked at us curiously or sympathetically, as it got darker and colder and my child continued to roar. With one arm, I did not have the option to pick her up and carry her home. If I had tried to drag her, I might have injured her. I took a few steps away, hoping she would follow. She held her ground. I felt frustration and, yes, anger. I took a few more steps and looked back but she didn’t budge. As night fell in Brooklyn, there she was, a small figure in a pink snowsuit, unwilling to give an inch, still howling at the top of her lungs. I turned around and we bought the ice cream, which I used as a lure to get her home, where I told her how angry I was.
In retrospect, I feel that this was not my finest hour as a parent. It was bad judgment to take her on foot to the store on a cold winter evening at the dinner hour. What if she had run or fallen into the street when I walked away? It would have been better to have let her eat ice cream on the stoop in the cold than to take the risk I did. The truth is, that night, I was tired and probably hungry, at the end of my tether, and I wanted to make a stand. When I think of the poor judgment, I exhibited that night, I have empathy for other woman who, faced with pressures of poverty or domestic violence, make mistakes that in some cases result in criminal prosecution.
By the time she was three, Liat outgrew her tantrums and morphed into a personable child who had comments and questions about everything from “Do cats go to heaven?” to “Why did God make bad people?” It was easier for me to manage a child than a baby or a toddler. As I sang, she danced down the street in front of me. She learned to let me rest if I was tired. Sometimes, we made it a game of doctor: “Pretend Mommy is sick and can’t move.” As I lay on the couch, she would examine me and render diagnoses such as “You’re sick.” However, the stress of my life as a working mother took a toll on my health and I got sick for real, with terrible digestive problems. I took some time off from work and was able to enjoy a few precious years as a stay at home mom, before financial necessity forced me back.
A friend told me about her mother who had polio and how, as a child, my friend believed she had caused her mother’s disability by spilling cream of wheat on her mother’s leg. I resolved that my children would never feel responsible for my disability. When I took Liat to preschool, her classroom was up three hefty flights of stairs. “It’s a race, “I would say with a laugh, forcing a smile as I dragged myself up the steps. She would have a big grin on her face as she ran past me. At the end, I would shrug and say, “I don’t know why she always wins.” When I was pregnant with my second child, the nice preschool teachers would come down to bring Liat up the stairs to the classroom while I sat contentedly in the lobby.
I was more nervous during my second pregnancy because I knew all too well the challenges ahead of me. Liat, then four and a half, was excited and we talked to the baby in my belly who we called “Miss Kick.” One day Liat said to me, “You and Daddy will die someday, but Miss Kick is forever.” In the delivery room, they put Miriam on my breast and she immediately began to nurse, then looked at me out of her big soulful brown eyes. My heart expanded to love another child.
Late that night, after I nursed, I stood with her nestled on my shoulder and looked in the mirror at the two of us, “It’s Miri and Mommy” I said. She looked at me like she understood. Nursing continued to go well and Miriam was soon a roly-poly baby. My mother bought me a stroller with big wheels and a bar across the front and we glided smoothly through the winter months. Even diaper changing went well. I sometimes wonder if Liat was harder to manage because she sensed my anxiety. We allowed Liat to handle the baby right from the start, with supervision of course. It wasn’t long before Liat, a capable five year old, began to act as a helper. At times, it seemed as if she thought she was Miriam’s mother or at least a co-parent. I wonder if Liat believed that I would not be able to take care of Miriam and felt the need to step into my role. In any event, Liat glowed with pride and excitement at every developmental step Miriam took. Perhaps this is why Miriam was walking at nine months and talking in sentences when she was a year old. Perhaps this is why Miriam’s “terrible twos” were almost nonexistent; Liat would not have tolerated any such rebellion. So intense was the closeness between them that when we once withheld dessert from Liat as a punishment, Miriam, who was only a few years old, in solidarity, refused to eat her own dessert.
Thirteen years in, my marriage to Don, forged by the catastrophic events of our twenties, which included not only my stroke but the deaths of both of our fathers, had become a prison to me. When Liat was eleven and Miriam was six, I asked him for a divorce. It was a painful decision but I knew I could not continue to grow as a person if we stayed together. I will be forever grateful that my first husband worked with me to have a civilized divorce” and that he continued to be an exceptionally loving, involved father. We agreed to stay in the same neighborhood and have on an equal shared custody arrangement. Liat, who was old enough to understand, was very angry at me for breaking up the marriage. Miriam missed me when she was with her father. Don and I both tried to give the children the support they needed. Though the divorce was my idea, I was lonely and frightened, with a range of new responsibilities from paying bills to unclogging stuffed toilets.
Nonetheless, these were fulfilling years for me as a mother. Once my children were school age, past physical dependency, I felt able to handle the emotional challenges of guiding them as they grew up. Maybe because I had difficulties as a “hands on” mother, I was well able to let go and allow them to develop as individuals without trying to impose my stamp on them as so many mothers do. They rode the subway everywhere from the age of twelve, chose and often shopped for their own clothes. Both my daughters grew up into independent and self-confident young women. The sisters are still extremely close, loyal and supportive of each other. Recently, Liat was ill and Miriam went to her apartment and cooked a refrigerator’s worth of food.
Yet I often wonder about the effect of my disability their formative years. On the most trivial level, did my children suffer from my inability to play patty cake properly? On a deeper level, did they feel they had to grow up quickly or God forbid take care of me? There are no answers to these questions. They are well-adjusted young women who say that they love me, yet still I worry that my limitations caused intangible psychic wounds.
Sometimes, when these doubts trouble me, I pull out a faded copy of an essay Miriam wrote in seventh grade, in which she wrote, “So when people see my mom’s arm hanging, they might think it is a little strange. They might feel pity or they might feel nothing at all. Well, I’m used to her arm. It seems perfectly normal to me, and sometimes I even forget that she ever had a stroke. When I was a little girl, I once said to my mom that if she hadn’t had the stroke she wouldn’t be Mommy—she would be someone else.” So, as much as this is the story of how I dealt with the obstacles posed by my disability, it is also the story of how my children adapted to me, how children make the best of the mother they have.
**
Published in Wordgathering, a journal of disability writing, March 2016.