Growing Able

Our house holds the stigmata of disability.  There is a bathing chair in the shower and there are positioning pillows in the bedroom, adaptations made to the highchair and improvisations with the stroller.  In the kitchen there's an avalanche of potions and lotions and syringes, nutritional supplements line our pantry shelves and on our counters prescription bottles rattle around like maracas.  There was a time, when Celia was still receiving in-home therapies, that I felt like adaptive equipment propagated here like jungle plants.

But so does love.  It's grown and grown and grown.  Like kudzu, love for Celia - and for each other - creeps in and fills the empty spaces and overtakes the full ones.  And the things that mark her as different, the presumed deficiencies, are the things that have given us new abilities and have cultivated in us the most love.  We've grown accustomed to making daily accommodations for her limitations, but we've grown more in our ability to see, as paramount, not the things that make our family different, but the things that make our family our family.
JEB