My Baby Rides The Short Bus

Jennifer Silverman, Sara Talbot, Yantra Bertelli

Description

An assortment of authentic, shared experiences from parents at the fringes is a partial antidote to the stories that misrepresent, ridicule and objectify disabled kids and their parents.

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 02 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604862553
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
The Other Combat Boot Drops
Rebirth
A Bus(wo)man’s Holiday
The Story So Far
Paging Dr. House
Evaluating Ezra
The Head Game (diagnosis)
Popeye
The Letter for Services
Enough Acronyms To Make Your Head Spin: Navigating the System & Advocating For Our Kids
Exile To Bridlemile or Where the @#$%&! is My Village?!
After the IEP
Play Therapy
Accidental Unschoolers
An Inadvertently Compelling Argument for National Health Care in Five Mutually Incriminating Scenes
Watching My Son Grow: An Illustrated Timeline from Birth to Three Years Old
Authentic Activism
Interpreting the Signs
Seen, Heard, Respected, and Believed
What I Said, and What I Didn’t Say
Jackpot!
What Should Have Been...
Building Bridges into Ordinariness
Diagnosis Invisible
A View through the Woods
My Friend Christine
Scout
How Do We Do It?
Respite, Community Support, and Transitions
My Mama Drove the Short Bus
How I Met Jennyalice
No Use in Crying
Life Among the Doozies
Glass Houses
Small Victories
Dragonflies and Inky Blackness: Raising a Child with Asperger’s Syndrome
Families: When the Balancing Act Induces Vertigo
Our Closet
“Because He’s Retarded, Ass!”
And We Survive
Thanksgiving
Dual Parentship Status
Taking the First Step
This is What Love Looks Like
Righteous Resources
What Do You Know: A Little Practical Advice After All
A User’s Guide to Self-Help Literature(Or, Who’s the Real Expert Here, Anyway?)
Special Needs Trusts: The Lowdown
Glossary of Terms
Resources
Contributors’ Biographies
Acknowledgments
Girls Are Not Chicks Coloring Book
The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World
Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
Friends of PM
About PM
This is the most important book I've read in years. Whether you are subject or ally, My Baby Rides the Short Bus will open you—with its truth, humanity, and poetry. Lucky you to have found it. Now stick it in your heart.
Ariel Gore, author, The Mother Trip: Hip Mama's Guide to Staying Sane in the Chaos of Motherhood
***
Smart, diverse, inspiring. My Baby Rides the Short Bus reminds us of what we all have in common and how much more work there still is to be done.
Vicki Forman, author, This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood
***
For the collection’s diverse and candid discussion of such topics as diagnosis, education, family, community support, respite and relearning to stand up in order to be seen, heard, respected and believed, I hereby declare this book required reading for outsider parents of all stripes, their allies, school psychologists, therapists, social workers and child advocates!
Jessica Mills, author, My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us
***
If only that lady in the grocery store and all of those other so-called parenting experts would read this book! These true-life tales by mothers and fathers raising kids with "special needs" on the outer fringes of mainstream America are by turns empowering, heartbreaking, inspiring, maddening, and even humorous. Readers will be moved by the bold honesty of these voices, and by the fierce love and determination that rings throughout. This book is a vital addition to the public discourse on disability.
Suzanne Kamata, editor, Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs
***
The contributors of this important and necessary anthology span a range of decades from a time when "defective babies" were institutionalized, to the nascent civil rights movement, straight on to a new era of independent living. The families sharing these stories live and often struggle with the consequences of illness, injury, genetic inheritance, or sometimes a perplexing and mysterious combination of factors, insisting that the world recognize a basic fact: We are not science experiments.
Disability is a uniquely humbling and equal experience, sometimes expected, often striking without warning. These parents are honest about both the distressing and illuminating facts of their lives; the stories are caustic, exhilarating, fierce, funny, harrowing. Yet despite the intricate and often overwhelming challenges they face, these parents and children never succumb to maudlin stereotypes, because, as one contributor learns, “it isn't saintly to take care of someone you love.”
Bee Lavender, author, Lessons in Taxidermy: A Compendium of Safety and Danger
***
There are smaller groups within every subculture, just the way there are mini revolutions within every larger revolution; and often, as well, the realization that everyone has not been included, after all. When any such group of people comes together to seek answers and share questions—uniting personal voice and experiences into a larger chorus—it creates a breakthrough that enriches all movements for social justice, as well as individual lives.
My Baby Rides the Short Bus is such a groundbreaking work—wonderful, thought-provoking, and diverse in different abilities of the different children. Little gems of life all buried in here, great tales. This book advances alternative parenting consciousness raising; and we need many more (on different separate themes within the multitude of those disenfranchised) in order to strive towards a community where no one will be left behind.
This is a collection of beautifully written stories, incredibly open and well articulated, complicated, and diverse: about human rights and human emotions. About love and difficulties; informative and supportive. Wise, non-conformist, and absolutely punk rock!
China Martens, author, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others
My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities
My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities
Edited by Yantra Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman, and Sarah Talbot
Foreword
Almost ten years ago, three moms met on an online community bulletin board for “alternative” parents. We were activists, but it wasn’t for a few more years that we discovered the most defining thing we would have in common: we are the parents of disabled kids. Our lives came together over the Internet and things changed. We all became parts of blended families as Yantra and Sarah became a couple, Jennifer remarried and eventually became a parent of two. Throughout, the diagnoses, the symptoms, and the services kept rolling in. We talked each other through advocating and strategizing, and we began to know a few things.
When friends from the online community Hipmama.com put together a conference in 2004, we offered a workshop on disabilities and parenting. In a windowless room, we chatted about what it felt like living with our kids while one of them obsessively watched the same movie for the 600th time and the other flipped pell-mell through a phonebook. Not a lot of other parents showed up, and most of them came only out of curiosity, not need. It didn’t matter who showed up to the three of us, because for once we were subject, not object. We had pulled ourselves out of cautionary tales about things that can go wrong with babies, out of isolation, and pulled ourselves into the center of our own stories together.
We decided to put together a zine, and this book was born of our work.
Raising a child with a disability brings a whole new level of isolation to “alternative” parents, who do not fit into the mainstream through circumstance, identity, or choice, and who carefully consider the implications of our parenting. Disability forces us to reach back toward the mainstream while moving us irrevocably outside of it. We might have been planning to put our children in small, alternative schools before we knew they were disabled, and now, after the diagnosis, find ourselves fierce advocates of their inclusion in traditional classrooms. While we might have had home births planned, we may spend years in hospitals praying for the success of invasive medical procedures. While we might have fantasized about anarchist communes before our disabled babies entered our lives, we find ourselves lobbying the legislature for increases in funding to state bureaucracies. We, who had previously rejected the institutional structures of mainstream culture or found ourselves on the margins to begin with, discovered that we are clinging to the slim hope that they will save us after all.
We are remarkably absent from the public eye. When we are in the media, it’s usually about a miracle cure that made some starlet’s child more normal. Or there is the occasional story that spotlights a stereotypical American (white, middle-class, two-parent, heterosexual) family showing off the gifts of a savant or highlighting a feel-good donation made to a poor, struggling family with special needs kids. At worst, our families are objects of ridicule in alternative and mainstream press sources.
Take, for instance Denis Leary’s 2008 book Why We Suck, in which he stated that kids diagnosed with autism are just stupid or lazy and their diagnoses are just for their parents who “want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can’t compete academically.”
Comments like this poke fun at the people in our society who are too visible for comfort, and they function to enforce invisibility. When your everyday experience only ruins a joke, you have to decide to stand out as both, “one of them” and humorless, or blend into the wallpaper of a mythical normalcy. These stories erase completely the reality that all children learn at varying rates, making our complex reality a bummer of a laugh-kill.
As parents of differently-abled children, we are often put on pedestals. People wonder in awe about how we cope, or hand us platitude