My Daughter With Down Syndrome Helped Me Understand Racism
How did disability help me understand racism? I am white, married, educated, and affluent. Our daughter Penny was born into many of these same categories, and yet she was also…
How did disability help me understand racism? I am white, married, educated, and affluent. Our daughter Penny was born into many of these same categories, and yet she was also…
The harm of privilege is exclusion, injustice, and isolation. When I say the word privilege, I’m talking about a set of unearned social advantages given to one individual or group…
Penny and I got to be bridesmaids together last weekend in my sister’s wedding. I’m going to let Penny tell you about it in her own words, but first I…
I spent a few hours awake in the middle of the night. It was the first time in a long time that anxiety pushed aside peace and dripped into my…
Hello friends! I’ve been writing blog posts, teaching, speaking, and writing books for years, but I wanted to pause for a minute and introduce myself to any new readers and…
How can we talk about race and disability without conflating the two? How can white, able-bodied, neurotypical people enter into this conversation? What is the difference between “white fragility” and…
This week we celebrated the end of Penny’s years in middle school with a car parade through campus, a dinner out—for the first time in four months—as a family, and…
Our daughter Penny is 14. She loves Taylor Swift and Fuller House and the Yankees. She betrays many signs of becoming a typical teenager: she groans when I wake her…
“I suspect every pregnant woman imagines a hypothetical life for her child. And every pregnant woman knows that child’s life won’t work out exactly as she imagined it. Life will…
Today is World Down Syndrome Day, a day in which we celebrate the life of our daughter Penny and of all the women and men with Down syndrome all over…