Please Treat My Daughter Like She’s Human

The wheelchair mechanic knocks at the door. My husband answers, and a hefty man wearing steel-toed shoes comes through our kitchen carrying a small tool box. I’m in the living room, strapping on my five-year-old daughter’s orthotics. The mechanic stands beside her empty wheelchair, which has been waiting in the dining room.

“Do you need anything from us?” I call out, pulling the laces of her shoe tight.

“Just the passenger,” he says gruffly.

I hurry up, and when my daughter’s all laced up, I lift her to her feet and send her over. In a thump-thump rhythm of deliberate, confident steps, she walks to her wheelchair, a lean, glimmering machine custom-made for her. She almost never uses it now that she walks, but when she needed it once this past year, her legs looked cramped. So the mechanic will tweak it.

He looks down past his belly to my 39-inch kid. Although she eats her weight in cheese, she’s very thin, just over 20 pounds, and a full head shorter than typical kids her age. “Hi there,” he says in a pitch people usually reserve for chihuahuas.

I get up from the carpet. I’m going to have to do the thing. It’s a thing I don’t always even realize I’m doing in the moment, and yet it’s a thing I’m compelled to do with regularity. I’m going to have to go and show someone that my kid understands, that she’s not a dog but a human.

My daughter, who has a rare chromosomal deletion, is largely nonverbal, and the words she can say aren’t usually intelligible to people who don’t spend a lot of time with her. “Hat” is sometimes “ha.” “Daddy” is “geggy.” Strangers don’t immediately know how to relate to her. They assume she doesn’t understand them. I often need to show them that she does. How do I do it? I use a regular voice. I talk to her like a person. I presume that she understands me, which she often does.

“All right, Fiona,” I say, “go ahead and climb into your wheelchair.” She places a leg on the footrest and tries to figure out how to get her body into the seat. With some assistance, she gets there. The mechanic notices that the footrest needs to be lowered.

“OK, honey,” he says again in a high-pitched voice. “Let’s have you come out.” But before she can stand on the footrest and lower herself down, he grabs her around the waist and pulls her out of her chair himself. I calculate that my methods have so far failed.

The footrest is the only thing to fix, so the mechanic is in and out, and my work as a parent is minimal. But it is after this brief interaction that it finally dawns on me how much invisible labour I do.

Yes, People Like Me Can Have Babies

My daughter and I have been visiting a lot of doctors and specialists lately. They cost chunks of time (sometimes full days), they cost gas (sometimes a half-tank) and they cost stress (sometimes immeasurable) as my husband and I figure out the logistics of who will pick up whom, and when and where. But they also cost the energy that goes into subtly advocating for my kid. It’s a bullet point in my job description, written in invisible ink. I’ve got to make sure medical professionals speak to my girl with respect so that she can preserve her sense of dignity. I’ve got to make sure they understand that she understands them.

“Does she show that she understands you?” the ENT asked me the other day while Fiona sat on my lap. He could have assessed her himself. She was, after all, right in front of him. Instead, he went through me. “If you ask her to do something, does she do it?”

“Yesss,” I said, willing myself not to roll my eyes. I wondered what it must be like for my girl to have to hear this kind of talk about herself all the time.

Minutes later, the ENT led us into a soundproof white-walled room, so muffled that when I spoke, it I felt like my ears had been stuffed with cotton. The ENT sat on the other side of soundproof glass and asked Fiona to point to different parts of her face. She obliged happily for several minutes. When we exited the room and returned to his office, he declared in a loud, bombastic voice, “Well, she’s not deaf!”

It was a little unbelievable. If he had realized what I’d already told him about my daughter, which is that she can hear and understand, then why was he still talking about her rather than to her?

This happens all the time.

The worst instance was a few weeks ago at another appointment. A doctor was assessing one of my daughter’s medical issues. She gazed down at Fiona, who stood directly in front of her, returning the gaze. Even though this doctor looked at my daughter, she still spoke to me. “I mean,” she started, “she’s a small, thin, weak…” Person, I thought. Say person. But instead the doctor said, “thing.”

A small, thin, weak thing. It’s among the last things I want my child to have to hear about herself.

Friends suggested I rage, call the doctor’s boss, remove my daughter from the woman’s care. But paediatric specialists are few and far between, and my daughter, who needs the care she provides, wouldn’t have any other options. My family and I often have to work with specific medical professionals, poor bedside manner or not. So a few weeks later, I called the doctor. I told her that my girl indeed can understand quite a lot. I quoted her back to herself: “small, thin, weak thing.”

She gasped. “I’m so sorry!” she said.

I said I didn’t want my kid going through life hearing people describe her as small and weak.

“I’m so sorry!” she said again, and I sensed she truly was. I asked her to be more mindful of her speech. “Of course,” she said.

At the next visit, this doctor spoke directly to my daughter.

It’s a taxing part of my job as the mother of a kid with disabilities. I shouldn’t have to do it, but I do. One person at a time, through subtle cues or direct conversations, I try to teach people: My kid is a person. Just talk to her like a person.