December 2020 – Alizabeth Worley

Last week, The Mighty published my piece, 10 Tips for Disabled and Interabled Couples Considering Having Kids, and I’ve so appreciated the kind, engaged responses I’ve received from different people.

When Michael and I got married, we didn’t really know any interabled couples (at least very well) who had been interabled at the time they got married and decided to have children.

In my family life major, I was discouraged to find that there was almost nothing at all about written parenting with a disability–not in scholarly journals, textbooks, or just about anywhere.

Online, most of the advice I found either went along the lines of either “You can do it! There’s nothing holding you back,” or, “Why would anyone with a disability have a child? That’s just signing them up for a horrible life.” That isn’t much of an exaggeration.

Neither is true. Disability isn’t a one size fits all kind of thing, but most disabilities will have an impact on parenting. For some people, it might be better not to be a parent. For others, having a disability means nothing more than finding new ways to get things done. For many people with disabilities, parenting probably would be best with some form of extra support.

That’s not a bad thing. Most parents are not truly self-sufficient anyway. But I think that is a message that is undersold to people with disabilities–either because they are told not to be parents at all, or because they are told they can do anything just like anyone else could do it.

We get cleaning help once a week, and we get a few hours of childcare help each day. For us, that’s what helps us have a really awesome, wonderful, functioning family. And I think it’s working really well. But it would be so much harder if we didn’t have those extra supports.

That’s not all that I write about here, but these are some things that have been on my mind.

Most people actually like carbonation. Unfortunately, I don’t. (I wish I did; occasionally, I have spent hours swirling pop cans just to get some pain-free flavor).

Fortunately for me, Michael doesn’t either. Last night, we found the solution to all of our carbonation problems: blowing bubbles.

Basically, we wanted to have a date but were really exhausted, cause, y’know, we’re parents and feel like our bodies have just been on the wrong side of a car wash.

So we broke out our two favorite date night beverages–whole milk and martinelli’s apple cider–and commenced sending telepathic heart emoji’s at each other while sipping our drinks with dixie bendy straws.

But, being well trained by my toddler, and avoiding sipping too much cider at once (on account of the carbonation I don’t actually like), I started blowing bubbles in my cider, at which point Michael said, “I bet milk blows better bubbles.”

So we blew bubbles for the next forty seconds, and would have for much longer if it weren’t for the headache I was incurring from trying to compete with Michael’s milk bubbles. (Yeah. Milk bubbles annihilate cider bubbles.)