This parent's essay didn't sit right with me

Photo by Elinor Carucci in The Cut

By Louise Kinross

On Sunday, I clicked on this piece in New York Magazine: Every Parent Wants to Protect Their Child. I Never Got the Chance.

There’s this adorable image of a toddler who appears healthy, but who, we learn, has cystic fibrosis (CF). CF is a progressive genetic disease that causes damage to the lungs and digestive system. It shortens life, although some people with the condition are living into their '40s and '50s.

His mother, Jen Gann, says she chose to have prenatal genetic testing while pregnant because “if something were wrong,” she would abort.

Due to human error, Gann never received the results, which showed she was a carrier for the CF genetic mutation. That meant her husband wasn’t advised to get tested. He also is a carrier. They found out their son Dudley has cystic fibrosis when he was a few weeks’ old.

The rest of the piece is about the intense guilt Gann experiences and her decision to sue her health providers in a case of wrongful birth.

I feel empathy for Gann. Every mother hopes she will be lucky enough to give her newborn child a clean slate at life.

Perhaps where we differ is that I don't view my child's health as an entitlement guaranteed through science. I have a son with a rare genetic condition. After he was born, I stopped counting the number of doctors who said: “But he had a normal amnio!”

Gann's piece is problematic for me in a couple of ways.

At one point she envisions telling her older son: “I’m sorry I didn’t save you, from your own life.”

Oddly, we don’t hear from any adults with cystic fibrosis in Gann’s piece, people who could speak firsthand to the complexities of their lives. Will Dudley grow to wish he were not alive? Does his opinion, when he’s able to render it, matter?

Instead, we read about a conversation Gann had with Dortha Jacobs. Jacobs established the legal concept of wrongful birth in 1975, when she sued her doctor for not diagnosing her rubella when she was pregnant with her daughter Lesli. As a result, Lesli was born with severe disabilities. 

This is where I felt an editor should have applied the brakes.

Lesli isn’t offered any agency in the piece. Gann says Lesli lives in supported housing, can’t see, hear, talk or walk, has intellectual disabilities and has had over 20 surgeries. “It’s a life sentence,” is how her mother Jacobs describes her parenting experience.

I empathize with the challenges experienced by Jacobs and her daughter, and the struggles Gann anticipates with her son. But nothing about disability, or illness in the case of CF, is ever black or white.

We aren't told about how Lesli communicates. Why do we not hear from this marginalized person, or from other people with disabilities?

Gann says if she’d gotten her test results, she could have chosen to get pregnant using IVF to ensure a healthy embryo. She then asks: “Would I still have made Dudley, this exact son, only without his disease?”

Well, uh, no. Her son Dudley was the son that she would have terminated, prior to trying again with IVF. Another child would have been another child.

And that’s the sticking point, isn’t it? When a child is born with a disability or chronic health condition, it’s part of their identity. It doesn’t sit, like an inert blob, separate from the human being. It’s a part of all of their experiences, good and bad, part of the way they see the world and interact with it.

Jacobs says she’d like to replace the term “wrongful birth” with something like “parental choice.”

What about choice in how we live our lives with our children, in the here and now?

Today I listened to Keith McArthur's podcast with Fabiana Bacchini, author of From Surviving to Thriving. McArthur, who writes The Instruction Manual, is dad to a son with a rare genetic condition. Bacchini struggled with infertility, then got pregnant with twins. One child died in utero, and the other was born severely premature, with many complications, and later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. 

This line from Bacchini stuck out: “You have to be making a choice everyday, a conscious choice, that this is a good journey, despite the hardness and sadness and the unknown.”

That's the one choice we all have.

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Young carers and other pieces of disability news

Photo by CBC News

By Louise Kinross

Youth who help care for a disabled or ill brother or sister were in the spotlight this week at the Young Carers Forum in Toronto, organized by The Change Foundation, an Ontario health think tank.

Alyssa Van Wynen, 21, centre above, spoke to CBC about her experience supporting her older sister Tiffany, left, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. “With my sister, she lost out on a lot of stuff, so there’s that huge guilt factor, too,” she says in this eye-opening interview. “Because I am younger than her, I’m getting all these opportunities and stuff that she didn’t have the chance to experience.”

The Change Foundation says as many as one-third of people between the ages of 15 to 24 in Ontario act as caregivers to a family member. You can watch some of their stories here.

Two Toronto programs for siblings of children with disabilities are the Young Carers Program through Toronto Hospice, and a Sibling Support Program at Extend-A-Family.

In other news, check out this interview with Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie, who is deaf, on AXSChat, where Twitter users discuss accessibility in business.

Microsoft has its own profile on Jenny.

The London, U.K. travel company Accomable, for people who need accessibility, has been bought by Air BnB. That should mean more and better accessibility features in Air BnB listings.

Two new books caught my eye today. The first is Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. That’s it, I thought! Academic ableism. That’s the concept I’ve been trying to articulate. How the culture of academia excludes people with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities.

Here’s a short passage: “Disability has always been construed as the inverse or opposite of higher education. Or, let me put it differently: higher education has needed to create a series of versions of 'lower education' to justify its work and to ground its exceptionalism, and the physical gates and steps that we find on campuses trace a long history of exclusion.”

The book looks at how universities have helped define, study and devalue disability, but never recognized disability as a source of knowledge.

University of Michigan Press describes it thus: “The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation.” Author Jay Dolmage is associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo.

The book come out Dec. 27.

The other book that intrigued me is A Feminist Ethnography of Secure Wards for Women with Learning Disabilities: Locked Away.

Author Rebecca Fish writes: “This book is an ethnography of locked wards for women with learning disabilities. It represents just a small part of my life the year of my fieldwork...These women had been removed, sometimes a great distance, from their families and friends, and compelled to lead a restricted life under surveillance and control.” Rebecca is a researcher with the Centre for Disability Research at the University of Lancaster in the U.K.

Finally, CanChild is looking for feedback on a new knowledge hub based on its F-words in childhood disability. Check it out and click on the top right to do an evaluation.

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'We're the custom tailor for people who use wheelchairs'

Koolway co-founders Jennifer Gallienne and John Cook with head cutter, sewer and pattern designer Vienna Liu.

By Louise Kinross

Jennifer Gallienne is co-founder of Koolway Sports, a premium Canadian line of coats, capes, boots and mitts designed for children and adults who use wheelchairs.

“Our outerwear is for people in wheelchairs who want to go out and enjoy life and be warm, comfortable and dry,” Jennifer says. “The reason people come to us is they can't find anything off the rack that has zippers in the sleeves—to make it easy to put on and take off—a half back for comfort, shoulder openings for chair straps, and little g-tube openings. 

“We work with every body shape. We work with children who use traches, and can't have fleece in the top of their coat. In one of our focus groups, a woman said that while she was running, the blanket she had on her child in the stroller kept falling off. I sat on the floor with her and drew a picture of a blanket with a zipper, like a bunting bag, and said 'Is this what you want?' That's how our product is developed—through parents, or the person in the chair, telling us what they need and want.”

Jennifer runs Koolway out of a home studio in Whitby, where she works with a team of professional industrial sewers who make the coats. “We're paying top wages and buying top-of-the line fabrics and notions from Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Colorado. We make quality coats that last 10 years.”

Koolways sells its products worldwide, with about 75 per cent of orders coming through its website, says co-founder John Cook, who is also president. Before taking an order, Koolway asks customers to watch a video on how to take six key measurements, then confirms sizing on Skype or Facetime, so that they can see the customer’s wheelchair and make recommendations. They also do in-home fittings or group fittings at schools, Holland Bloorview, Variety Village and Whitby Ability Centre.

The adaptations in the coat are designed to reduce dressing time from 20 minutes to two minutes, John says. “For parents and school caregivers, that frees up a lot of time.” The company's most popular product is its winter coat with a detachable front and back blanket. It costs $510 to $760, based on features.

“Our main challenge is the lack of government grants for families who can't afford them,” says John. “If a family doesn't have the resources, we'll try to work with them. We'll contact third parties. Variety International recently authorized our product in some regions as eligible for funding. Sometimes we may have a family within our circle whose child has outgrown their coat, and they may ‘angel gift’ it to another family. We've reached out to Easter Seals, but they raise funds for other items.”

Koolway is partnering with parent-run foundations Three To Be and Peaceful Hearts Georgina, as well as Ability Online, to “matchmake” families who can benefit from a gently-used coat, Jennifer says. “If only people realized that a coat is a necessity.”

Jennifer began Koolway after losing her job as a graphic designer at age 40.

Like the “connector” personality described in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, Jennifer had a knack for knowing people, and using these connections to develop her business idea.

Jennifer's cousin was a seamstress. A parent had asked her to custom-make a coat for her son who used a wheelchair. “I knew dressing was a struggle for people with disabilities, and I said let's go into business,” Jennifer recalls.

As a graphic artist in Toronto, Jennifer had worked in the Fashion District in Toronto. “I used to sit on the street car with Agnus, who was a pattern maker for a high-end designer in my building. I picked up the phone and called Agnus to see if she would design some patterns for us. Do you remember those bug shirts that are made for people who go into the woods at their cottages? I called up the bug shirt man and picked his brain about where he manufactured his products in Toronto. I had to learn everything by trial and error and I did that, picking up the phone and asking people.”

One of the people Jennifer called was John, a neighbour who’d volunteered with Special Olympics when he worked in insurance in Calgary. “It was a Wednesday night and I was watching Dragon’s Den and I got a phone call from Jennifer saying ‘I’ve got a business, would you like to see what we’re doing?” John says. “They needed a friendly dragon and that was me.”

Recently, Koolway reached an agreement with George Brown College’s Fashion Exchange Program to have students help them plot, grade and digitize a cape, so that it eliminates cardboard patterns. “I had no idea this Fashion Exchange existed,” Jennifer says, “then I heard Matt Galloway on CBC’s Metro Morning interview the director.” The program trains students to be industrial power sewers, and includes refugees who were skilled sewers from other countries and need to learn Canadian standards. Koolway has placed an order for over 100 capes.

Jennifer describes the business as a labour of love. “We’re the custom tailor for people who use wheelchairs around the world,” John says.

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Self-compassion may fuel parent resiliency

By Louise Kinross

Greater self-compassion was related to less stress and depression in parents of adults with developmental disabilities, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities.

The findings are based on self-report measures of 56 Toronto parents who attended one of two six-week groups as their children waited for services after leaving high school. One was a mindfulness group where they were taught to pay attention to their feelings and thoughts in an accepting, non-judgmental way. The other was a group providing information and support on getting services, many of which are wait-listed. One-quarter of the adult children didn't have anything to do weekdays.

The paper defines self-compassion as “being touched by and open to one’s own suffering, not avoiding or disconnecting from it,” and “generating the desire to alleviate one’s suffering and to heal oneself with kindness.”

The two parent groups didn’t focus specifically on self-compassion, but the mindfulness group included learning how to do a loving kindness meditation that begins with a focus on the self.

The current study found self-compassion was negatively correlated with depression and stress—even after controlling for parents’ perceived caregiving burden; for parents of children with autism, who sometimes have more stress and depression than parents of children with other developmental disabilities; and for neighbourhood income.

“Self-compassion is something that matters and that we need to pay more attention to,” says investigator Dr. Yona Lunsky, a senior scientist at CAMH who partnered with Developmental Services Ontario and Community Living Toronto to run the groups. “Parents are very compassionate when it comes to their own kids, but do they have that same compassion for themselves?

“Often, these parents feel inadequate. Why do they feel inadequate? Because of all of the things they’re supposed to be doing to make sure their child is okay. Sometimes those things work, and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes that’s hard on parents. They may experience inner psychic pain, or the pain of the child or spouse or other siblings.”

Parents’ first reaction may be to dismiss that discomfort. “We don’t have time and we’re scared to look at what’s going on in ourselves—that we are suffering. We think ‘If I’m going to be strong, I won’t pay attention to that, and I’ll keep going.’ But if we’re disconnecting and pretending it’s not there, we’ll never relieve that suffering, and our approach will eventually be harmful.”

Yona likens it to an athlete who continues running on an injured knee. “You have to notice what’s going on when you’re in pain, so you can treat it with gentleness and love and care.”

Parents often feel an automatic sense of compassion for their child, but don’t extend the same kindness to themselves. “Maybe instead of berating yourself because you did something wrong, you can forgive yourself, or notice how you’re experiencing it, or just be gentle. It’s about gentleness.”

Yona notes that there’s a body of literature on self-compassion in the general population, but work looking at its role in parenting children with disabilities is early and emerging.

“We had a sense of self-compassion's importance for parents from past research, but this is the first study to demonstrate its association with mental health for parents of adults with developmental disabilities," says Suzanne Robinson, a graduate student at York University who was lead author and analyzed the data for the study. Suzanne is doing her PhD in clinical developmental psychology and worked as a summer research student at Holland Bloorview in 2010.

Yona says future research could look at understanding why some parents of children with disabilities are more self-compassionate than others, and how to foster self-compassion in this population.

You can contact Yona at Yona.Lunsky@camh.ca.

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'We just fell in love with her at first sight'

Catherine and Trish Emmons and daughter Priscilla, 3, are the focus of our new A Family Like Mine video.

Priscilla, known as Cilla, was born dependent on drugs to a mother who couldn't care for her. She spent her first month in the neonatal intensive care unit in pain, on morphine, inconsolable. At nine months, Trish and Catherine adopted her.

"When we first brought her home, we noticed that she would have huge temper tantrums when we would leave her," Catherine recalls. "And I don't mean by leaving the house. I mean she would be in the living room and we'd get up to get a cup of coffee and she would start having a temper tantrum because she was so distraught that you were going to leave her. Because a lot of people don't realize that kids, babies, suffer loss. They think 'Oh, they don't remember.' But at that point she'd already suffered from two major losses. One from her birth mom, and one from her foster mom."

This is a remarkable family with great insights on parenting, adoption and celebrating differences. Thank you to social worker Barb Germon for suggesting them.

A Family Like Mine is a video series about diverse families raising children with disabilities. It's incorporated into the curriculum for second and third year medical students at the University of Toronto.

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Stares at the mall

Many of you know Sue Robins as the author behind The invisible mom, one of our most read posts about social isolation among families of children with disabilities. Sue recently took a poetry class and wrote this piece, which she says is fiction, based on her experiences raising her son with Down syndrome, and stories other families like hers have shared with her. Louise

Stares at the mall

By Sue Robins

Always the caboose

He’s minding the gap

At the back of the line.

Invisible but visible

Is a puzzling way to be

Stared at, all but ignored.

How old is he

The nurse asks his mom

He’s standing right there

A teenager, not a ghost.

I hate my face

He announces one hot July day

Sits on the bench, arms crossed, opting out of the moments.

I was asked

Many times by other moms

Do people stare at you in the mall?

Why yes, yes they do.

First they stare at my boy.

Then they stare at me.

They finish up by staring at my boy again. 

I see their heads turn

To and fro

As if we are a tennis match.

Marked by pity, not love.

This is how you stop making eye contact

Begin walking with your head down

And don’t leave the house.

We are not contagious we cry

But nobody hears us.

Instead they shush us to be quiet

And demand that he inspires them.

Our circle becomes smaller and smaller

Until we collapse into the tiny dot of our four walls

Passing the time by gently and together

Placing a fence of sticks

Against our respective hearts.

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Finding the music in everyone

By Louise Kinross

The other day I posted a call for story ideas on the BLOOM Facebook page.

Karen Bojti wrote: “Another ‘out of the box’ person I have discovered is Laura Nadine. You can Google her. She’s a professional violinist, a wandering minstrel and music teacher. She is also a woman on the autism spectrum. She is teaching Charlie to play the violin.”

I hopped over to Enlightened Audio, which is Laura’s website, and this sentence jumped out at me: “I teach music to all humans.”

It sounds like common sense, but it’s revolutionary. Many children with disabilities struggle to find a music program they can attend, let alone flourish in.

Laura lives in Buffalo, but she travels to Toronto on weekends to teach here, so she came to visit me.

Laura primarily teaches string instruments, but she also teaches piano and guitar at a beginner level.

“The key ingredient to my teaching approach is presuming competence,” Laura says. “I truly believe every student can learn. We just may need to adjust the method or the way in which the student connects with me. I want to make it clear that I’m not a music therapist. I’m teaching children to acquire the skill of playing the instrument, and when they’re finished, these students are playing core material like everyone else.”

Laura says about 80 per cent of her students have disabilities. Most have autism, but she’s also worked with children with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and ADHD.

“One of the things I think is flawed in understanding disability is that we think disability is static: when you’re assigned a certain IQ, that’s what it is. We don’t take into consideration the error of the measurement systems, and that kids are fluid. They can grow and learn more. I’ve seen this time and time again with autistic children going from being non-verbal to communicating with a letter board. We’ve got testing models that assume all humans fit into a static model. We really don’t understand the grey area of the spectrum, and the ability to make new [neural] connections to compensate for places where there might be flaws.”

When working with a new student, Laura encourages them to make a sound with the violin. “Their bow hold might not be perfect, but making a sound is rewarding,” she says. “I let the child take the lead. If the child is afraid to touch the instrument, we unpack it and look at it, and I talk about how it only makes sound when the child wants it to make sound.”

For a child with autism who has trouble getting her body to do what her brain wants, she'll take the child’s arm and help her bow up and down.

For some children with autism, touching the violin to their shoulder and resting a chin on it “can feel like lightning shocks going through the body,” Laura says. “The goal is to get it on their shoulder as soon as possible, so they can train their own body to tolerate the input. However, if I have to hold the violin first to get to that step, then I do that. I would face the student and say ‘I know your brain understands what you need to do, but your body needs time to learn.’”

The good news is that “the body and brain have an amazing ability to increase tolerance to input, so people on the spectrum can learn to be a little less sensitive through training and understanding. The more times we do something, the less intense those shocks will feel, until they can independently hold the instrument.”

Laura struggled in school growing up because her autism wasn’t diagnosed. “The hardest thing for me is my nervous system,” she says. “I went to public school in the states, and they had no windows in the classroom and fluorescent, vibrating lights. It was hard to be in this building with all this input. There were bells ringing and kids chewing on pencils. I could even hear the clocks tick and the water fountain pump turn on. I had meltdowns that weren’t physical—where I would shut down and couldn’t speak. It manifested in night terrors. My teachers thought I was sick. I dropped out of high school in Grade 10 and did correspondence school.”

Laura says that during her struggles at school, “music was my island of increased ability.” Within four years she was playing at a professional level, and was asked to tutor other music students after school.

Laura says she may have synesthesia, where “one sense gets confused with another. In my case, my vision has a sound. What I see creates music in my head. When I was in music class at school, I would pick up snippets of sounds throughout the day, then organize them into a song to play on my violin. It was an outlet for stress. I called these songs shadow songs, and one of the first I wrote was called All Alone. I wrote it at age 14. I call them shadow songs because everything has a shadow, but for me, everything has a song.”

It wasn’t until Laura was 27 that she learned she had autism. “My second child Jacob was doing some odd things that reminded me of myself,” she recalls. “He had to have things organized in a very special way, and he wasn’t speaking fully until right before he went to kindergarten. I took him to the doctor and he gave us the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Then, while talking to me about Jacob, he handed me some literature about adults on the spectrum. I guess I was obvious.”

Laura says getting the diagnosis was freeing. “It was like someone wiped the fog off my vision. The diagnosis is a toolbox, not a label. It told me what set of tools I needed to adapt to succeed in the world, not just survive. Nobody wants to just survive. People want to have a quality of life and I knew I wanted to be more.”

She went to college to study psychology and education. “With a diagnosis, I was able to ask for help with note-takers and extended time on tests, and I went from being a failing student to having a high GPA.” Laura says she wanted to understand better how her mind worked. “I felt many of the interventions for autism were obedience-based, not development-based, and I wanted to understand more so I could do more.”

Laura says what she’s learned from her students is that “there’s always a way, even when it feels like we’re pressed up against a wall and not making any progress. I’ll wait for the student to shine a light on something else that ends up working for us. That’s part of being student-led. I’m not trying to fix the student. I’m teaching them to navigate through their disability.”

Laura receives lots of positive feedback from her students and their teachers. “One girl who uses a letter board told me that music changed her life, and was a new way for her to communicate her inner thoughts.”

Laura hopes to move to Toronto in the New Year and become a Canadian citizen. “When I came to Toronto, it was the first time ever that I felt like I was at home. The community here is so warm and embraces unique perspectives. I can’t wait to be a part of that society on a daily basis.”

Laura has a book: I am Snamuh: My Journey with Autism and the Power it Gave Me. She also has a few signed copies for anyone interested.

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