There was a great post out last week by Carly about moms who blog about their kids with disabilities, or “special needs” as it’s popular to say here in the U.S. Her post was excellent – it’s here – I think you should take a minute to read it, if you haven’t already. I’ll wait. …
Andrew Pulrang, disability blogger and podcaster, is featured today in Voices from the Disability Community
Restarting the “Cool Cats: Voices from the Disability Community”, in which people with disabilities are featured. The point of this is to share different slices of different lives. For people to hopefully connect over shared voices, experiences or disabilities. Please welcome Eliza Riley! Getting to Know You Your name: Eliza Riley What’s your connection with …
The gay rights movement and the disability rights movement both started around the same time. They were fighting similar battles, struggling for equal civil rights, for justice, and for an end to discrimination. Some 40 years later and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that gay marriage is legal, while people with disabilities still face …
Wheelchair Mommy Disabled Momma Cripperella Hedgehog Blog: Riley’s Mom Walks Funny The CP Mommy Words I Wheel By That Crazy Crippled Chick MeriahMeriah Nichols is a career counselor. Solo mom to 3 (one with Down syndrome, one gifted 2E). Deaf, with C-PTSD and TBI, she’s also a gardening nerd who loves cats, …
About Society for Disability Studies The Society for Disabilities is exactly that: a group of (primarily academic) people that study disability as a subject. They splice and dice it in every imaginable way: from sexuality to employment, from neuro-divergence to deaf issues in rural India. I mean, you name it, they’ve got it covered. I …
Katherine and I are presenting at SDS this year on Deaf Identity. We really wanted to talk about it because we have so many questions ourselves, about what is means to be deaf – or Deaf. She wears cochlear implants, I wear hearing aids. She is fluent with ASL, I am not. Neither of us …
You all know how much I loathe the way people use the term “special needs” interchangeably with “disability”(my post about that is here ). The term was originally an educational one, designed for kids with extremely unique learning needs. Plenty of people who have real educational “special needs” do not have a disability and plenty of …
4 years ago, I wrote a post called The Choice to Suffer. In it, I was talking about how caring for an elderly man in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s helped me to heal. I was about as wounded as a soul can get when I met him, and he taught me how to hold hands …
“Oh my God!”, Mikey exclaimed as he read about Frida Kahlo for the first time, “she’s like someone you would be crazy about; a painter AND disabled!” Later he added that if she were alive, I’d probably be stalking her. I started my “Frida Period” when I lived in Tucson, Arizona about 20 years ago. I …
A new proposal by a state senator seeks to make it criminal to abort a fetus on the basis of its disability or gender. Since women rarely abort in the United States on the basis of gender, it appears (as David Perry aptly stated), as if gender is simply a smokescreen for the real Trojan …
When people say that they don’t associate the word “disability” with me or with Moxie, I think they mean it as a compliment. It certainly has that tone. “I don’t think of you as having a disability!” I’m not insulted by these statements. I sense the love for us behind the words, I don’t take …
I am an adult with a disability. I have a child with a disability (different from my own). And I am a professional educator. I have come to loathe the term “special needs”. I feel like it’s a watered-down euphemism for “disability”, originating in the educational sphere and has since been misused all over the …
So, when my friend Heather’s daughter went viral in her Target ad, she decided to do something staunchly in the way of a true ally for us with disabilities: she reached out to Katie of Changing the Face of Beauty and asked what could be done to include EVERYONE with a disability in a media/ad …
I heard that Stella Young died while the sun was setting on our camp on the coast of Sinaloa, Mexico. The sky was exploding in a multitude of colours, all bright, all fiery. Like she was herself – bright and fiery. It hit me hard. I lay awake with my children sleeping on and around …
I’m not a political junkie and my brain isn’t particularly suited to understanding the processes of politics. But there are some things that I know – as a person with a disability, as the mother of a person with a disability, as a professional who worked with disability and employment for a decade. One of …
Difficult conversations are the uncomfortable conversations, and I think, the ones that we often shirk by the very nature of that discomfort. But they are usually the ones that we need to have. I think this whole conversation of assisted suicide and killing children with disabilities is one that is extremely uncomfortable. And one that …
Mikey and I agreed that after my heavy solo-parenting gig of the summer and also solo-care of our chitlins during stretches when Mikey left the farm to buy a truck (or visit friends), I deserved a break, a Momcation. Like, a real momcation, without even one child with me, completely solo. So I signed up …
It’s good to see people with disabilities doing something out of the ordinary. Good to see children with disabilities traveling and exploring the world. Good to see parents with disabilities being parents, good to see pictures and read stories that are about humor, power, understanding and connecting. We need those stories, all of ’em. Our family …
I love Elvis, I really do. I think his voice was simply magic, like the male version of Karen Carpenter, it’s liquid velvet on a rainbow. Anyway, I was watching “Elvis on Tour” the other night with the kids and I was watching how everyone reacted to him. Sure, he was wearing a cape (!!!), …