Mail with Mom

Recently, MissCripChick wrote a blog letter to her Mom and Amanda of Ballastexistenz received an email from hers.

MissCripChick writes, in part:

please do not take this as sarcasm, but i just wanted to take a moment and let you know how much i appreciate the fact that you haven’t tried to murder me, drug me, take me off my ventilator, withhold food, lock me in the garage, abuse me, harvest my organs, or rip my utereus [girl parts] out over the years.

And, lest her thanks be seen as unnecessary, Amanda describes the email her Mom really did send to her:

My mother wrote to me a few weeks ago to make sure I knew that she had never, ever, once, thought of killing me.

It was one of those surreal moments where I sat there and thought, “If I were non-autistic, non-disabled, I doubt she’d have felt the need to reassure me of something that should have been a given. And I think a non-disabled person would have been puzzled to get such a message out of the blue. I wish I was more puzzled as to why.”

The above letters are one response to the belief that the murders and resulting media coverage of disabled children are isolated, tragic events rather than an epidemic of prejudice and devaluation. They illustrate the effect the murders of Katie McCarron and Lexus Fuller and Tracy Latimer and Ulysses Stable and Christopher DeGroot and so many other children have on all families with disabled children.

As Amanda says:

What on earth kind of message makes parents believe they actually have to reassure their own children that really, seriously, they never even once considered killing us, and that really, seriously, we were wanted?

I can only guess it’s some toxic mix of the constant stream of murders and the messages that the press and various autism charities send out about the supposed frequency and normalcy of such thoughts. This isn’t support. Anything that makes my parents, and doubtless others, question such fundamental things about their relationship to their own children, and seriously believe I might think they’d had these thoughts, is not in any way support.