Surprise, Surprise
Surprise, Surprise
First reading Nick Springer on the Move, I wondered how I could possibly be of use to my internship mentor, Jennifer Stratton. She is passionate about adaptive sports, access, paralympians. No one would call me sporty. I knew next to nothing about disability or athletics or the intersection of the two. In third grade, fascinated by Helen Keller, I learned to finger spell, but now my fingers are stiff, and I can’t make the letters automatically anymore. In college, I learned rudimentary ASL to sign songs in our children’s theatre productions, but I was never fluent. As a drama teacher, I have often blindfolded one person in a pair and asked the unblindfolded person to lead their partner on a trust walk. And, it’s true that our daughters attended an inclusive nursery school in NYC. But my resume in this area feels slender at best. How could I possibly be of use?
When Jenn and first spoke, we talked a little bit about the versions of disabled people we meet in children’s literature. I came up with Colin in The Secret Garden. He is frail and ill and not very likable, but neither is Mary Lennox. Both are healed by spending time outside and in finding some modicum of hope by attending to reviving the neglected garden. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, I recalled that Mary, Laura’s older sister, went blind. She behaved better than Laura from the outset; blindness made her seem almost saintly. Who else? Ada in The War That Saved My Life, a book our fourth graders love. While our daughters’ library consciously included racial diversity, we had never considered physical disabilities as an important aspect of inclusion.
Jenn explained that Nick, a family member, had died last spring. I felt sad. She had written his story, one full of inspiration, and illustrated by an artist, Chris Kuster, who held the paintbrush with his mouth! Yet Nick was gone. How to get others to know and share his amazing story? Jenn had not done much over the past few months—she felt a little stuck—and I suspect, very, very sad. Could I write to various organizations and tell them about the book? The least I could do was write letters. But we didn’t get any responses. What other tactics could we try? School librarians? A grass-roots campaign? Crowdsourcing? I’ve done that a couple of times on Facebook as Jenn and I sought titles of books featuring physically disabled children, athletes, parents. There are lots of things to try, and I will use my own spring break to do a lot more, but what has surprised me most is my new-found awareness of disability.
Jenn shared with me that her son, an amputee, plans to adopt children and wonders if he should adopt children with physical disabilities because they will understand that he “gets” it. This story has lodged somewhere between my brain and heart. Where are the models for this boy? How is it we erase disability from children’s literature? And if we do include it, it is in villainous tropes—like Captain Hook or Peg Leg Pete, the Pirate—or overly treacly heroines who triumph? Where are the real characters? Our conversations inspire me, make me want to spend hours brainstorming, networking, shouting from the proverbial rooftops.
I am thinking about this topic all the time now. You know when you learn a new word and you suddenly begin to see and hear it everywhere? That’s how I feel—as if I have sudden clarity on something I had rarely considered. My role for Jenn, whom I admire hugely, may be to be an amplifier. I want to turn up the volume on her work, to broadcast it, to add my voice as an educator to insist that we, as a culture, pay attention and offer models for children like Jenn’s son, for children whose parents live with a physical disability, for kiddos who make use of wheelchairs and walkers and prostheses. I know the legality of the word disability, but I don’t like the “dis” prefix. I want a world where all abilities are valued and the physically able don’t count more than those who live with physical disabilities. Naïve? Idealistic? You bet. Inspiration comes from the Greek meaning to breathe life into. I am interested in breathing life into a topic I had never considered deeply until this internship.
