Wish I Had a Clever Title But I Don't

My mother is a physical therapist who did early intervention with children. She would be called to make a home visit to assess what, if any, help the child would need moving forward. These were children ranging in age from newborn to 7 years old, all dealing with any one of a number of things that would require a different life. Being a physical therapist, my mother focused mainly on motor skill development and muscle-related exercises to teach slow-learning children how to walk, crawl, sit up, find balance, hold a spoon...etc. For me, I have a distinct memory, which happened far later in my life than I am comfortable admitting, of my mother turning to me after some thrown aside comment and telling me, "Just because they navigate the world in a different way than you, doesn't mean their lives are any less than yours." It was a real slap-in-the-face wake up call for me, the realization that differently abled people don't give a shit about the pity or sympathy I may want to throw at them, they merely want to live as full a life as possible, the same as me. That they will do that in a way that is different from me means nothing. Which is all merely to say that the readings this week helped to bring home how shortsighted I can be in my view towards "others." I cannot escape my straight, white, maleness, and much of this semester has been me fighting "privilege responses" I didn't even know I had.
Another, I guess only semi-related story, is of a guy I played basketball with in seventh grade. I don't remember his name, I just remember that he loved basketball. Neither of us were starters, but we would have a blast cheering on the team from the bench, and relished any playing time we got. He was much more aggressive than I was, with a stronger belief in his own abilities and a willingness to experiment on the court that I just didn't possess. He also only had one arm. I remember at tryouts thinking, "Good on you for trying, dude, but...c'mon." He shut me and my friends up pretty quickly. He wasn't born with one arm, but had been climbing a tree as a kid and reached up and grabbed a power line. They had to amputate that arm, and he moved on. I thought of him during the reading this week, in that in my head he has the same no-nonsense tone that Petra Kuppers had. He asked for no pity, would smack you with his good arm for trying to help, and was maybe one of the best dribblers of a basketball I've ever been around. The point being: the phrase disabled does a disservice.

P.S. Just read on playbill.com that Martyna Mayok's The Cost of Living won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It's a beautiful play about a man with cerebral palsy, a quadriplegic woman, and the people that care for them. If anyone wants to read it I have a copy.