I hate the word sacrifice because what it implies is that somebody is settling for less when s/he could be getting more and more importantly that the one doing the sacrificing is the hero while the one for whom it is made is someone less than a hero. India Knight wrote these few words in the Times of London on the subject of being a mother to a disable child, which made think:
Bravery is picking yourself up and getting on with it; bravery is the lioness instinct to defend your vulnerable child with your life – and, if needs be, your sanity. Bravery is dumping the loser husband who’s taken to eating separately because he can’t cope. Bravery isn’t pretending that the inconvenient truth never happened.
Tens of thousands of women (and men) go through their lives as parents of disabled children in a heroic way, every day, without bleating and without the benefits of a comfortable home, a book advance and a sympathetic media.
[…] It’s not a fashionable thing to say but motherhood is about sacrifice and duty. It’s about understanding that you will no longer be able to put yourself first and understanding that there isn’t a personality type that “copes” with difficulty or disability better than anyone else.
We’re all muddling through as best we can; our reward is anything from a hug from a “normal” child to the painstaking ghost of a smile from the immobile face of one who is not. Anyone who feels unable to grasp this should get their tubes tied, pronto. And Hollander should give up writing books, stop pretending that everything’s fine and get the help she so clearly needs.
For some reason, I can’t agree with Knight because I think that parents of disabled children tend to make the disability of their children about them without realizing that for their children, disability is all that that they know, and yes is normalcy. I think that people are too obsessed with normalcy and never realize that no matter whether a child is disabled or not, s/he is always going to have difficulty and will always look at her/his parents to understand how h should look at himself or herself. In other words, parenthood and especially motherhood shouldn’t be about sacrificing but about accepting the acceptable and rebelling against the unacceptable. Sacrifice is a noble thing. However, ultimately, it almost never has the effects and consequences it was intended to have. To say things crudely, shit always happen. Thus, mothers, parents may as well do the right and the most difficult thing that is to accept that disability is going to be normalcy for their child and that her/his happiness doesn’t depend on her/his parents’ sacrifice but acceptance of the fact that her/ his disability isn’t about them.
