When a Toddler Helped Me Experience Disability Pride

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Since it's still July, and thus, still Disability Pride Month, I thought I'd share a story.

(With thanks to Grace Dow, whose post: When a Little Boy Helped Me Experience Disabilty Pride jogged this memory.)

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At eighteen years old, I had only just started attending what I call The Edge church (not its real name.)  I'd gone quite a few times over the past month and a half and enjoyed the quiet peace of the empty sanctuary as a friend prepared to play on the worship team for youth group.

Related:  Let's Talk About Faith

One Wednesday night, though, things felt different.

At the time, I wrote:

I don't feel this longing very often, but as I sit here in the sanctuary of [The Edge], I just want to run and dance and jump! I don't miss it very much, but right now I do and I am!  I want this so much! I can't even tell you how I want to just throw these crutches aside and go running across this wide open empty floor! 

Why am I longing like this for an ability I have never had?

***

A week later, I was back.

I left the sanctuary during worship on purpose because I didn't want to deal with the onslaught of feelings I was bound to have.

So I passed the time using the bathroom, and in no rush to get back.

It was just outside the bathroom, at the water fountain, where I caught sight of a toddler with her mom.  The baby was perhaps a year old.  She saw me and smiled.  I smiled back.

[Image: A baby with blue eyes, her hand by her mouth]

Then, she approached me, and at the time, I wrote:

She was completely taken by my crutches and could not stop running her tiny hand over them again and again. 

I think it was her mom who finally insisted they continue on wherever they were headed.  This baby might've stayed as long as possible, touching my black and blue metal crutches.  The things I had thought were the bane of my existence.

But this baby's tenderness toward them...  It started to change me.

This tiny human's acceptance of them...and of me...planted a tiny seed of something in me.  And though it would take eight years to leave the church that would end up harming me so deeply...and many more years to connect with the disability community, I do think my acceptance of myself started here.

And while it is no baby's responsibility to foster an adult's nonexistent self esteem, she helped just by being herself.

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