Eliza Hull

Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
This book contains situations involving ableism and eugenicist views especially held by professionals in medical, social care and educational fields in regard to disabled and neurodivergent people starting a family and parenting. This means that some essays include accounts of abuse, medical abuse and negligence, racism, homophobia, homoism, transism, misogynist behaviour, bigotry, and ignorance. Slurs are discussed, but no slurs feature in this book. Some essays discuss institutions, body trauma, suicide, suicidal ideation, and medical procedures in detail. Accessibility and the social and medical models of disability are discussed frequently throughout this book. There are some essays that talk about baby loss (miscarriage and infant death).

We’ve Got This is a much-needed selection of essays from disabled parents about parenting as disabled people. This was a book that was very relevant to me as someone who is one part of a disabled couple. As many of the authors mention there is hardly any information out there about disabled parenting, and the information you do come across is filled with the attitude that disabled parents either can’t parent for various reasons or they shouldn’t become parents because they are passing on their hereditary conditions. These ableist and eugenicist beliefs are not only ignorant, they’re spreading misinformation and have an extremely harmful effect on disabled people.

The essays in We’ve Got This are from disabled parents from a wide array of backgrounds, and situations. It is wonderfully intersectional and includes many different disabilities which I especially appreciated. I often find collections like this fail to comprehend just how diverse the disabled community is. That wasn’t the case here and Eliza Hull has done a fantastic job of curating this book. The essays themselves are brilliant, written from the heart and are very informative.

My one complaint is that I feel that the book would have benefited from content warnings at the start of each essay as some of them talk about some very difficult topics, and they appear without warning at times which I found quite uncomfortable. By that I’m referring to my own personal triggers because We’ve Got This does talk about a lot of uncomfortable situations and rightly so. I thought I was aware of some of the traumatic situations that disabled people dealt with regarding pregnancy, however, I now realise I was only just scratching the surface.

Despite being difficult to read at times We’ve Got This is a book that I’m going to be recommending to everyone, disabled and non-disabled people. I was asked by someone about how relevant this book is to people who aren’t parents or thinking about starting a family, and I personally think this book is relevant to everyone. As mentioned at the start of this review disabled parenting is an area that is extremely scrutinised by so many people many of who have never actually bothered to take the time to speak to or spend time with a disabled parent.

Parenting is terrifying for anyone, and being disabled adds so much more pressure because of the social and medical models of disability. The wealth of experiences, knowledge and sense of community that We’ve Got This offers is invaluable, offering advice and support for disabled people while shedding light on the ableist and eugenicist attitudes of medical, social and educational professionals.

My personal favourite essays were by Nina Tame who is always a joy to read, Lucy and James Catchpole who are both disabled but have different disabilities, and they talk about how that affected the way they were perceived as parents, and Jasper Peach who has chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia talking about parenting with those conditions. Those three were ones that resonated with me personally in some way, but I gained something from and every single one. This is a brilliant book that will be hard to read, but it’s a necessary read.

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Black Inc Books is not just a Melbourne publishing house; it is an advocacy phenomenon, producing the ground-breaking Growing Up... in Australia series which includes

• Growing Up Asian in Australia, edited by Alice Pun (2008)


• Growing up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss (2018, target="_top">see my review)


• Growing up African in Australia edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke (2019, see my review)


• Growing Up Queer in Australian edited by Benjamin Law (2019)


• Growing Up Disabled in Australia edited by Carly Findlay (2021, see my review);


• Growing Up in Country Australia edited by Rick Morton (2022, reserved at the library) and


• a compilation issue titled Growing Up in Australia (2021)

This series celebrates diversity in all its forms, and is notable for the way each anthology of short memoirs gives voice to a wide range of identities and experiences. But one thing they all have in common is that while all the contributors are shown to have agency in their own lives, none of them had a choice about their circumstances, which arose from genetic inheritance, accident or illness, or the decisions of their parents.

Growing Up Disabled, We've Got This, Stories by Disabled Parents is a companion piece to Growing Up Disabled in Australia. But it offers a slightly different perspective because although some of these parents acquired a disability later in life after their children were born, many of these contributors despite an existing disability chose to fulfil their yearning to be parents and to exercise their right to do so. For them it was a pathway that was difficult but worth it.

What reading this collection makes clear is that the judgements of others made things more difficult than they needed to be. Sometimes this was because their choice to have a child was questioned, in a way that it never would be for would-be parents without a disability. And sometimes implicit in the question was the hurtful assumption that the risk of having a baby with the same disability was not one that anyone would want to take.

Being a disabled parent is a rebellious act. Disabled people should have the same right to parent as anyone else, but often when we decide to start a family we are met with judgment and discrimination. We are questioned rather than supported. We have to push up against the medical system, which is particularly problematic for disabled people. And we have to confront how ableist society's model of parenting is, even in the twenty-first century. (From the Introduction by Eliza Hull, p1.)

Eliza Hull is the creator of the ABC audio series We've Got This and if you haven't already come across it, I recommend listening to the whole series. Some of the participants in the series are featured in the book, and tell more of their story. Carol Taylor, for example, is a lawyer, fashion designer and artist, and her disability-led fashion labels have been featured at the Mercedes Benz Fashion Festival. Which is a long overdue acknowledgement that disabled people are just as interested in looking good as anyone else. A quadriplegic since a car accident on her honeymoon, Taylor is also the mother of D'arcy, now fourteen, and despite her occasional doubts, he doesn't think having a disabled mother is in any way different to any other parent-child relationship.

It hasn't impacted negatively on his childhood. In fact, he credits it with teaching him the importance of patience. He understands that Mum gets frustrated when she can't do things independently and hates asking for help. He has more empathy than other kids; he says he tries to always imagine what it must be like 'in my wheels'. He believes having a parent with disability has enabled him to always see the good in other people and never judge a book by its cover. But don't be fooled into thinking he walks around with a halo: like most fourteen-year-olds, he still has mum chasing after him at high-speed reminding him to pick up after himself and keep his room tidy. (pp.192-30

You can hear Darcy speaking for himself about this in this podcast episode of We've Got This: From the Mouths of Babes.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/05/06/weve-got-this-stories-by-disabled-parents-ed...… (mehr)