Accepting and celebrating ourselves

And what I assume you shall assume. 

[Walt Whitman Ib. Song of Myself, 1]

As one who lives with disability, accepting myself, warts and all was immediate, there was no choice – to coin the title of a currently popular song – I was  “Born This Way”. As well, I felt fully accepted growing up with my parents and 7 siblings; they had no choice either – we were all going to experience my ‘different’ness together.  Through my years as a counsellor and a writer, I have met many persons with disability of my era and beyond, all having expressed the same sentiment – for the most part, familial acceptance was a given, though some relatives struggled, also a given. It was the learning to celebrate ourselves beyond the family that was the challenge. Some thrived while others did not, as the demons of self-doubt and sometimes self-loathing grabbed them and took them under. A sad reality of living in a world where perceived perfection is the ‘prize’ of acceptance.

Accepting ourselves is often the first choice we must make if we are to grow --- healthy and happy and strong.  As infants, those of us with since birth disabling conditions knew nothing else, so we had nothing to compare to with regard to how our differentness/differences would be viewed by those who do not possess or live with those differences. As our awareness of ourselves develops so, too, does our awareness of how others perceive us --- good, bad, or indifferent. Not unlike how able-bodied people are perceived as they grow and move beyond the family to the larger community to take their place. 

We must not make the mistake of having our disability mean more to us than our other more valuable traits should mean. Parents need to let go of the Madison Avenue driven notion of ‘perfection’ and, along with their child with disability, venture out into the world not necessarily armed to do battle but to take their place and show that ‘can do’ will define life and living. The ‘can do’ might take longer and might be out of the ordinary in terms of execution, but it is no less important than any accomplishment of an able-bodied person. 

It is most assuredly not a given that a person with disability, whether born with it or acquiring it later in life, will always be accepting of their lot in life. To say I never minded or was never bothered by being born with a disability would be a grotesque lie. Certainly, as with any toddler, I wasn’t terribly aware of the concept of ‘acceptance, as I lived within the safe cocoon of the family dynamic. Crawling or stepping outside the safety sphere that included  mother, father, brothers and sisters paved the way to acceptance by those who would be come playmates, schoolmates, friends, boyfriends, and a husband. I can say, however, that my acceptance grew as my life experiences expanded so that I was able to appreciate that wobbly, scrawny, weakened legs would not be what defined the substance of me, as a person, as a woman.

My faltering steps to acceptance were due in large measure to how I perceived myself in relation to able-bodied peers; to be clear, I was never blatantly excluded as a youngster, but at times, I didn’t feel particularly ‘in’cluded, and my apprehensions were magnified once I became a teenager when how we looked mattered; as shallow as that may seem, that’s the reality of the teenager.  Appearance was everything to the teenage girl – or so we girls thought. Teenage angst aside, in my choosing to forever and always accept the body, the shell that housed the stuff of me, others were more at ease accepting me --- a choice they freely made unconstrained by the opinions and attitudes of their elders – in accepting me, they accepted their own flaws. 

In Western culture, elders being obviously of a  different time held the view that people ‘like them’ (me) were to be pitied, or shut away from view – institutionalized, and often not living beyond the age of five years. In days gone by, it wasn’t uncommon to ‘warehouse’ people with the type of neurological impairment (hate that word) I have; very often in State run mental hospitals where care and contact was minimal at best. . What killed the institutionalised child was not a progression of condition, since cerebral palsy is not a disease, but the lack of socialization -- isolation/deprivation of human contact does, indeed, kill. A broken spirit becomes a deadened spirit. In not invigorating the spirit, the mind, the body and the soul, life becomes untenable. Even the profoundly disabled can be stimulated in one way or another. Ask any parent who raises such a child and they will be quick to tell you that though their child may not hear, may not see, may not seem to comprehend, on some primitive level, even the most intellectually ‘damaged’ person has an awareness. Therein lies the major lesson for everyone – celebrate and accept the life that is, not the life that parents thought their child was supposed to have or hoped their child would have. To paraphrase Popeye – ‘I is what I is!’ 

Carla MacInnis Rockwell is a freelance writer and disability rights advocate living outside Fredericton, NB with her aging Australian silky terrier and a rambunctious Maltese. She can be reached via email at carmacrockwell@xplornet.ca