A parent's search for acceptance

By Louise Kinross

Perhaps it’s the nature of Twitter’s brevity, but I see a disturbing trend in people tweeting simplistic, declarative statements about how parents of children with disabilities ‘should’ feel and think.

An example is this tweet on Autism Awareness Day:

I do not long for a non-Autistic version of my child. I have the child I want. I LOVE the EXACT child I have.

My thinking was, great for you, but what does this have to do with where other parents may be on their own journey to accepting their child’s differences?

Acceptance isn’t a finish line, an endpoint, that you cross. It’s a chaotic process without a clear path, one that despite your best intentions, often sees you circling back. You walk through a forest of shock, denial, grief, guilt and outrage before you get to that small clearing. And just as you think you’ve arrived, you find yourself back in thick brush.

Are parents of disabled children not allowed to have the messy, ambivalent feelings that all parents—I would argue, all people, regardless of whether they have a disability or not—have?

Does it help parents who are struggling with their child’s disability to mandate the kind of feelings they should have? To have them recite simplistic, black and white statements about their relationship with their child—and attempt to snuff out any feelings or thoughts that diverge?

The tweet above is a response to a quote from Andrew Solomon’s Far From The Tree in which an adult with autism recounts how painful it is to recognize that his parents can’t accept a fundamental part of who he is.

“When parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is that they wish the autistic child they had did not exist, that I had a different, non-autistic child instead. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence.”

I think the truth of that autistic adult’s experience can exist with the truth of what it’s like to parent a child that one's culture largely views as undesirable, and in many respects expects parents to “fix.”

I’ve found parenting a child with disabilities (not autism), a humbling experience. Having a child that others desperately seek to prevent, as is evidenced in the dizzying race to refine prenatal testing, forces you to reexamine all of the values you grew up with, the comfortable little set of ‘This is the way the world works’ rules you deluded yourself into thinking were real.

One of the platitudes I especially found to ring hollow was: “If you work hard enough, anything is possible.” It still surprises me that I actually believed that growing up, that I was that gullible.

Now I know that it’s not true for any of us, whether we have disability or not. We are all mortal, we all have our limits, and we all fear that in some essential way we don’t belong, that there’s something ‘wrong’ with us, that we’re not good enough. As Jean Vanier says: “We were born in weakness and we will die in weakness.”

Having a child who was different forced me to strip away my own desire to fit in, to not rock the boat, to pretend that I had things “all together.”

It forced me to recognize all of the ways in which I feel inadequate, the ways I wish I was a better person, a better parent, more perfect, less human—but am painfully aware that I am not.

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, David Brooks talks about how experiences that upend our world view change us.

“First, suffering drags you deeper into yourself. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routines of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be. The agony involved in, say, composing a great piece of music or the grief of having lost a loved one smashes through what they thought was the bottom floor of their personality, revealing an area below, and then it smashes through that floor revealing another area.

Then, suffering gives people a more accurate sense of their own limitations, what they can control and cannot control. When people are thrust down into these deeper zones, they are forced to confront the fact they can’t determine what goes on there. Try as they might, they just can’t tell themselves to stop feeling pain, or to stop missing the one who has died or gone. And even when tranquillity begins to come back, or in those moments when grief eases, it is not clear where the relief comes from. The healing process, too, feels as though it’s part of some natural or divine process beyond individual control.”

In a recent talk in Toronto, Andrew Solomon spoke about acceptance as a spiritual practice and quoted from the gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas. “Jesus says, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, then what is within you will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, then what is within you will destroy you.’”

I wasn’t at that talk, but those words seem to get at the heart of digging deeply and honestly within ourselves to see what is there—the good and bad, the enlightened stuff and the petty, fearful stuff we wish we were past. To let it all rise to the surface where we can see it clearly and compassionately.

In my mind, the process of raising a child with disability forces us to look at all of the ways in which we, as parents, don’t accept ourselves.

I think when a parent wishes that their child were different, they are often, in fact, wishing that they could make themselves less imperfect, less fragile, less helpless in a world over which they exert such little control. They are silently screaming at the injustice that they are unable to complete a parent's most basic task: Protect your child.

To me, the process of acceptance in parents raising children with disabilities is twofold: it’s parents cultivating love and understanding for their children and it's parents developing love and compassion for themselves. Those two experiences are intertwined and can’t be pulled apart.

This weekend there’s a festival for artists with disabilities called Tangled in Toronto. Its promotional material includes this lovely quote by Eliza Chandler:

"Tangles are messy and imperfect, but they are also complex, intricate, organic, even deliberate."

That, to me, is a fitting description of the rich emotional experience of raising a child with disabilities. We need to stop insisting that it’s not.