- Share This Post
- submit
- 3
-
Sparkle (0)
Sparkly rainbows and miracle cures: those are what too many books about parenting children with special needs are made of. We may succumb to them during our initial post-child's-diagnosis research frenzy, but the truth is most of our kids have already told us who they are. Our job is not to chase the sparkly rainbows, but to plant our feet on the ground and start supporting those children.
To do that, we need books that tell us the truth about parenting our kids. We need realistic advice. We need the tools to fight for our children, and ourselves. We need hope tempered with practicality. We need empathy. And most of all, we need to hear voices that echo our own.
Sarah (Sal) Talbot, Jen Silverman, and Yantra Bertelli are sparkly-rainbow-rejectors who were not able to find books that reflected their own experiences as parents of children with special needs -- so they created the new anthology, My Baby Rides the Short Bus (disclosure: I am one of more than 30 included authors). Here's what they had to say about why and how the book came to be:
Tell us how the three of you knew My Baby Rides the Short Bus was needed and necessary.
Sal: Ariel Gore did a reading from her work in Hip Mama at the UW Book store in 1996 or so, and I asked her if she might publish more essays from parents of kids with disabilities. She asked me to write one. That's when I understood that it wasn't just that I didn't have the time to look for good books by parents of kids with disabilities, there just weren't that many out there. I thought about the experiences of the parents I knew and the perspective that educators I work with have. It seemed like the educators were a little bit clueless about what it means to parent a disabled child; the kinds of mourning one goes through, the things one has to celebrate. I felt that as an educator, I was constantly putting on my parent hat to try to get my colleagues to open their minds a bit. The educational community has really embraced the book. I'm thrilled to be able to give it away and know that people are now getting more than just my perspective on what this all feels like.
Jen: I wasn’t seeing our story in any of the books that I had read in the years since my son’s initial diagnosis nine years ago, and I’m a pretty voracious reader. There wasn’t much I could relate to in what’s been published with regards to my son’s level of functioning, my gallows humor, my (radical) politics or my struggle -- especially when I was a low-income single parent. Most of what I found was really preachy or treacly. I know that for some people the idea of a piece like Welcome to Holland is reassuring, but for me it made me want to scream. My hope for this project was that we’d give voice to what was being left out of the dialogue of parenting kids with disabilities.
Yantra: So much of our lives are open and on display everyday for the general public to witness. Our kid’s challenges and our desire to be a part of the world surrounding us causes heads to turn and we knew we were not the only ones. This high visibility can be silencing. I think our book shakes up this power dynamic a bit and that is a refreshing change to our day to day experiences.
How did you find a publisher? Was the publishing process different from what you anticipated?
Jen: In retrospect it was remarkably easy to get a publisher, and it had a lot to do with networking. The three of us had done a zine together in 2005 with the same name on the same topic, and didn’t have plans to do a follow up. One day I was daydreaming and thought, what if we did a book and reached a larger audience? There was no one I’d rather work with than Sarah and Yantra, so I roped them into it.
I contacted a publisher I had met through some activist work, and queried him. It was obvious that I really had no idea what I was doing, and he walked me through the process of putting together a formal book proposal. We drafted it over email, since they live in Seattle and I’m in NYC,
