“I didn’t know, but I knew…”
From This Too is a Life edited and presented by Tracee Garner
By Angel R. Ackerman
As a child, I did not know I was disabled, but, on the other hand, I knew.
I knew I got picked dead last in gym class. I knew my ankles would often “pop” and fail me. I knew every time we jumped out of the school bus for a fire drill, that I would land on my knees and not my feet. I knew the other kids could roller skate, and I could not.
I was born in 1975, about three months premature. My lungs collapsed twice. I was three pounds, seven ounces. The doctors told my mother I wouldn’t survive. She named me Angel.
When I lived, they told her that I wouldn’t make it to kindergarten, that I wouldn’t walk, I wouldn’t talk, and that I’d have developmental delays. They turned out to be wrong, so by the time I entered school, my mother stopped taking me to doctors.
I attended a special public preschool for students with disabilities— an orange van came to pick me and drove me to an elementary school 20 minutes away— and a caseworker visited my house for what was probably occupational therapy, but I was four, so I thought she was there to play.
I’ve known my whole life that I’ve had cerebral palsy. But I didn’t know that was a disability. It was a fact, a trait, like brown eyes or curly hair. Cerebral palsy was never the forefront of my existence. I was never the pivot-point of my family. I didn’t have any siblings who lived with me. My parents were both high school drop-outs. My dad was a high-functioning alcoholic, and I watched my mother become one, too. When they both drank, my parents would have violent arguments that sometimes ended with the police. I had to find my mother’s dropped contact lenses and sometimes my father’s false teeth, when he got drunk enough to lose them.
My disability became a minor detail in my parents’ already complicated life…
To finish the story, find This Too Is a Life via your favorite bookseller. On Amazon here.
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