Season 3, Episode 2: Dorothy Palmer and Heather Morgan

On this episode we talk with Heather Morgan and Dorothy Palmer about disability justice, creating a WhatsApp group to support parents raising children with disabilities, politics related to disability and how it feels to be a Canadian senior who lives with disabilities both now and during the pandemic.

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Transcript

Welcome to this episode of the Mad and Crip theology podcast we're so excited to be here today with Heather and Dorothy who will be introducing themselves in just a moment um Miriam and I just have a couple of announcements before we get started. Uh we just wanted to remind our listeners if you would like to submit to the journal issue that's going to be coming out in the fall around trauma and resistance please submit your pieces by the end of August and you can find the journal page easily just by searching up the Canadian Journal of Theology Mental Health and Disability on Facebook it's probably the easiest way and then that will get you to the submission link for that and we also wanted to sort of have a little celebratory moment and just thank all of you listeners because we uh our numbers are doing so well and we saw this week that in the last 30 days our podcast has had over 200 downloads so that made me not not a lot compared to some other YouTubers or podcasters but for us it's huge so thank you so much for your continued support and your encouragement um I like I know for myself like I run into people sometimes and they'll say oh I listened to your podcast it's so nice to meet you so thank you so so much for for encouraging us and supporting us um and helping us to know that uh what we're doing is important because some days it's we're not sure you know some days we're not sure so so thank you so much to all of our listeners!

Great and then now for Heather and Dorothy I wondered if we, if you might introduce yourself. Heather you are an old hat at the podcast

you can re-introduce yourself and then pass it to Dorothy. Sure yeah I think this is my third time on the podcast which is kind of fun it feels like I know what I'm doing finally um I'm Heather Morgan I just finished my MDiv at Emmanuel College um and I am a wheel power wheelchair user um I am a white middle-aged lady who wears uh glasses and has short hair and today I'm wearing a comfy uh zip up sweatshirt and a t-shirt and I'm sitting in an office that has some books on the shelves to my left and you can see a bit of the couch and some things on the wall behind me and I um am a person who lives with disabilities uh physical and mental health disabilities and I am a person who has family in both directions with disabilities I have a mom with disabilities uh kids with disabilities and a brand new granddaughter with disabilities so um I live this disability life in all sorts of directions and um so I try to come at it from lots of different angles so today's piece comes at it from a different angle than I've come at it before with you folks so there's my introduction so Dorothy your turn! Thank you first of all I want to say thank you to everyone who made this possible I'm looking forward to this chat immensely I'll begin as Heather did with an image description um I'm a 68 year old senior with gray hair and glasses I have a purple top on because purple is the best color I'm sitting in my apartment with one of my original needleworks behind me on the wall which I made during covid for one square of every week of isolation I'm a writer I have published five books in about 50 articles and short stories I'm a retired High School drama and English teacher and union rep some of that work I'm very proud of and I multiply disabled have been so since birth and have acquired new disabilities as I age as do many seniors um I am glad that Heather mentioned this because it wouldn't have occurred to me but I also have two disabled children so who are now grown and and that is interesting because it is another intersection of disability that I will include in all of my future introductions of myself thanks to you so I'll just say thank you and leave it there.Thank you so much to you both what great introductions um we wanted to get started um by inviting you to briefly summarize the pieces that you wrote for the previous issue of the journal um so I'm going to invite Heather to do that. All right uh so I um the piece that I contributed to this journal was actually a piece I wrote for a class I took with Amy last spring which was very fabulous on mental health and theology um and really really enjoyed it did a bunch of of different things and uh we were invited at the end of the class to work on a project very open-handed we could do anything we wanted what was the thing that we thought the world needed when it came to mental health and Theology? And um I was just um at a point where my youngest child was aging out of pediatric care and so I was thinking a lot about you know what the last well between the two of them you know 22 years of parenting around disability was like and and the things not only the things I had learned from parenting my actually three kids with disabilities but um but also the things I've learned in um all of the parent support groups that I had been part of over the years and both the good things and the bad things that I had experienced in those spaces as someone who was also disabled myself it's sometimes a really interesting space to try to navigate as a disabled person yourself when you're talking to parents of kids with disabilities but increasingly I was feeling like you know the there's this reality that so many of these parents are dealing with complex PTSD from their experiences of parenting um these very often very very uh disabled children in the group that I was a part of and so I started to think about all of the things that would be necessary for them to be able to access um mental health supports and care and all of the barriers to access that they were facing and in the back of my mind part of why I was thinking about this was because I was thinking also about some pastoral conversations I had had with young adults with disabilities who were trying to navigate relationships with their parents who who had become you know individuals with C-PTSD from parenting them and all of the dynamics that were complicated in that and thinking like what would it take to interrupt those dynamics to um offer a new space for relationship between parents and kids in those um kinds of situations and so what I tried to do was I tried to develop something that would overcome the barriers that I saw these families dealing with that would allow them to access mental health resources with the unspoken goal of of trying to help facilitate deeper better healthier relationships bewween parents and kids and parents and each other and you know parents in the the World at large and obviously you know I think it's really interesting that you've paired the two of us together because because both of our pieces talk about the ways in which the uh increasing limits on accessing respite care and PSWs and all of those things that have happened over the last three years and the the impact that has had and so I'm looking at it from the perspective of the impact it has had on the mental health of these caregivers but but it has had this impact on everyone so um I think it's a it's a real good point for us to come together on on this conversation I'm excited about it. And Heather I might I might ask you just briefly just to mention what was the way that you wanted to actually have this thing that you created yeah um how did you get that to parents in the project? So the idea in the project was that um we would use WhatsApp which is an end-to-end encrypted uh app that can be downloaded onto smartphones or used on computers so it doesn't require a high um amount of tech availability most families in these situations have one or the other of those devices just to be able to navigate life with their kids um and uh used volunteer uh volunteer you know sort of triad system of program facilitator group facilitators and part uh participants and the idea was to uh build on the success of a online uh Facebook uh parent support group that I am a part of that's actually you know a healthy one and a successful one I haven't found a lot of those in my travels but this one I'm I'm really excited by what they do um and to use the asynchronicity available in something like WhatsApp to be able to allow families who would otherwise struggle to be there at an exact time for an exact length of time over a course of eight weeks or ten weeks or whatever it would be um to be able to be consistent with that attendance and so instead uses the fact that you know you can reply at 2:00 AM because that's when you're up uh helping your kid with his trach or you can reply at 10:00 AM because that's when you happen to have gotten your kid finally off to school for the day or whatever it is so that you could still be a part of it within the other balls you're juggling in terms of life.

Thanks so much Heather that's awesome and uh I really loved your project that's why we wanted to have you wanted to talk about it and hopefully um people will be more energized and think about ways they might be able to to integrate it into their caregiving or um pastoral ministry work um but we all come back to that so thank you so much and Dorothy would you be able to let us know uh just Briefly summarize the piece you wrote for us?

Um I was a redhead although you can't tell that now and I think um like several other famous redheads in Canada like Anne anger was my default and so when I first saw the call for this anthology I'll confess I was a little angry because I'm surrounded in canlit with um publishers and anthologies and journals all ready to give people ancillary to disabled people (parents caretakers spouses children) uh the mic and have books published by those people many of which have gone on to win important awards but there's very seldom room in Can Lit for disabled people themselves to be the authors. I've had to fight tooth and nail over the last decade for that to be seen as important and I think the title of caregiving also struck home to me in a way because my position on that has changed for many years I was very Pro Care Work you know very Pro disability justice's idea of integrated shared Community Care and then the older I got the more I looked around and went "nope nope it's not here I can't see it it does not apply to me it will never apply to me" I eventually realized to my immense sadness and I was also quite terrified because it's it's difficult to oppose a lot of the thinkers behind care work and Sins Invalid and Disability Justice who I have huge respect for but I now think on this fundamental issue they're wrong and so that's was really hard and that's this piece is my first initial attempt to say well here are some of the things that that approach to care work doesn't include and I'll use myself as examples and here we go!

Thank you so much Dorothy and we'll I hope we'll be able to come back and unpack a little bit of that as the episode goes on.

Miriam? yYah um I'm wondered if we might start this one, move to Dorothy because Heather I'm realizing question two and question three are very similar so we can have you answer them at once. But for you Dorothy this, we hope the journal is read by everyone obviously, but we aim it towards faith communities, theological communities and you know your answers resonated with me because I got into disability and crip theology because that only saw maybe white middle-aged older men you know with a lot of privilege writing about, me, and I kind of wanted to know it or demand with another purpose finding about me and and like kind of wanted to to take the mic a bit away from their voices no matter how much I admire and respect a lot of their work it's important to have multiple voices. So if a church if a community ever theological education course pick up your piece what would you hope they could learn from it?

And from this this conversation? That's that's an interesting question for me. I would say my first response is to respond the way that you and Amy did when I wrote you my first email and said um would you be interested in considering an article where the person doing the caregiving was also the disabled person receiving the caregiving and you both responded with a joyous love and said absolutely and that was wonderful that immediate welcome and inclusion uh was really important and then I also felt that there was a that I don't often feel as a disabled senior a certain acknowledgment that again this comes from Disability Justice that I was the expert on the front as a disabled senior and that um many people have read a lot of articles by disabled people in their 30s and 40s but there has not been a lot of people my age in their 60s 70s 80s or 90s and there absolutely should be so I guess any kind of faith group in these days often has many seniors amongst them um and that is your first source of inspiration and expertise and knowledge. Not educated people not people with disability you know degrees is wonderful as that is to have if you want to find out about the experience of disabled seniors you need to talk to disabled seniors. So I I would say that would be my advice to use the rich um experience of the congregation and of the extended parts of the congregation and then move forward from there.

I just have a follow up because I have been thinking about this for a while but um you know as seniors age many change their abilities many become increasingly disabled

and there is often grief and anger and a whole bunch of emotions tied into that and my own grandma at one point um didn't want to use a walker and here I was, I've been using a walker since I was four so I wasn't very caring when she, she um had had some grief around that

change in her ability right? But I wonder what wisdom you would share for for seniors facing that or for community members in relationship with them? Yeah that's an excellent question and it is definitely one of the ways that generationally we're different. Yeah. Um I was born in 1955 I was raised by parents who were kids in the depression yeah that is central to the way they grew up and the way they raised me and central to what became a huge burden of internalized ableism because the self-resistant resilience that were was expected of them during the Depression they passed on to their children and was expected of me and the idea that you don't ask for help the idea that it's shameful to ask for help the idea that you're weak if you ask for help I mean it's capitalism's wet dream isn't it? Yes! That once we get old we should just drop dead and not use up any resources or make any requests you know internalized ableism is a function of how capitalism values workers and devalues everyone else so that's also seniors also disabled people and of course you're so right the older we get the more disabled we get according to the census at 65, 50 percent of people are disabled by 75 it's actually 80 percent and many at that point have multiple disabilities not just one and we you know my generation was not equipped didn't know anything about that didn't know anything about Disability Justice only felt shame and and I guess um when I'm talking to people my age who say things to me like how can you possibly be proud of having a wheelchair and a walker and a mobility scooter I wouldn't want any one of those things and I say I always say well I really do want them because I want to be able to get out and see you and secondly why would anybody be ashamed I said um I wear diapers now just the way I did when I was little it was necessary then it's necessary now why would I be ashamed of that? Yeah. It's a medical necessity and it's interesting to see when I talk to friends who are my age when you start to unpack that they start to go oh so maybe I'm not thinking in my best interests ah what a good tnsight no here's some other possible ways to look at that um and and it's a journey you can't push people too hard you can't just sort of say you know I've got it all solved and here's how you can solve it you have to let people go through their own journey and just give them some you know bread crumbs through the forest to maybe start headed in that direction um but people I think many people want to go on that journey so it's exciting when you can open some of those doors for them. Yeah thanks Dorothy.

Amy? Uh Heather would you like to talk to us about the faith community implementing your program like we we talked a little bit about just needing WhatsApp um what else let's say if you if there's a big community members or faith community leaders who are listening right now and they thought oh man that'd be really great for for us to start we have some parents who could really benefit from this uh what would be a recommendation on how to get started? Well first of all I just have to say I could listen to Dorothy talk for this entire podcast and just soak up all of her wisdom and joy and I am I am thrilled to be here with you Dorothy um I think uh the first thing I would say to faith leaders of faith communities is um is something I would probably say at the beginning of the uh Creative Justice uh conference that's happening on June 10th in Hamilton that we're doing with a Deeper Communion um and that is that uh we uh a lot of times when I talk to people about uh disability and church they say well we don't need to have a disability ministry because we don't have anybody with disabilities in our church and so I think you know first of all you do you just haven't asked and you're not paying attention and second of all you know you would have more if your building was accessible but we don't even have to go into those two things because the reality is that families like these are not ever going to be able to show up consistently to a building on a Sunday morning for church it's not possible it's not safe like Dorothy has talked about um some of these kids if they get a cold they could be in the ICU for a month or longer it could kill them uh to get the flu and very very easily so even before covid that was not an option you didn't see these families in churches really ever and so I think that the first thing is to to help faith communities understand that there is a there is a world outside of their doors outside of their building that needs to experience love and compassion right where they are and and to see this as an opportunity to meet those uh folks outside of their doors who will never ever be able to come through their doors um and and to frame it that way that's going to be difficult for some uh churches to even comprehend because a lot of churches have a mentality that says that the goal is to get people to show up in their building and all of their ministry and all of their work and all of their effort is centered around that these people are never going to show up in their building that's not the point the point is to take the love and compassion that we want to share with the world out into the world through this method and then the second thing I would say is um you know it's been purposely designed to be uh run at the you know at the program facilitator level by somebody who has some background in um mental health in trauma in in some of those resources it's uh not something to put just a random person into you know choose select wisely select someone who is going to be safe and who is going to be um nurturing and who's going to have the background and the resources to deal with what comes up within the group so that they're not overwhelmed um and then the third thing I would say is is use your network to tap into the broader network who do you know who knows someone um who do you know who can help you connect because people have understandable levels of mistrust and fear and uncertainty and you need to earn their trust you need to earn the right to be heard you need to you need to make it do you need to do the work to make it clear that you are a safe space you can't presume that people will assume that as a starting place so do the work find somebody really really awesome to run it um and ideally you know support them in doing that um and then thirdly make sure that you recognize that the this is not a ministry to get people into your doors but to get yourself out of your door to connect to others.

It sounds like it could um work as a program as a mistry shared by many churches you know. Yeah it would be it would be fabulous if uh you know a group of folks who all have a passion for caring for families with disabilities were to get together and um work together to run this as you know five or six different churches and and if those churches were willing to even put just a little bit of financial resources behind it to offer um like some some gift cards for groceries or some other resources that are tangible to go along with it so that so that there was actually some some resources to be able to meet even some of the very very most basic practical needs to give families just the enough window to even participate in this and recognizing how hard that is not as like trying to buy their time but as a as a recognition and a valuing of what's going on in the complexity of what they're dealing with I think that would be really really helpful. If I could could jump in for one second to something that you've said which really went off for me the excuse that you say sometimes you receive we don't need disability initiatives because we don't have any disabled people is something that I hear all the time in Can Lit. I hear it all the time everywhere that has three steps up well we don't need a ramp because we never have anyone with disabilities come that's because we can't get through the door!

Yes and and with you know I've had many responses throughout the years some of which could not be podcasted um but the ones that sort of have been most interesting and worked a little bit is I've looked at someone and said I wear glasses how many people who come to literary events wear glasses and they go oh well over half I said well then you've already got well over half of your population is disabled well what do you mean glasses are assistive devices they've just become so normalized that nobody recognizes them as assistive devices and nobody recognizes people with glasses as disabled until they take them off at which point it's very clear in many cases that they are disabled and then the next thing I say to them okay so if you have no physically disabled people to your knowledge in the room are you proud of that? Right. And I just leave it there because nobody can defend that you know and and I see 23 percent of Canada is disabled are you proud that you are excluding us? You know and it's just leave it there because that forces an internal moral wrestling that they have obviously managed to give themselves an escape hatch from by saying there aren't any disabled people coming well you're the reason they're not coming so how do you struggle with that and and I often find that a short comment like that and then just shutting my mouth and looking at them is a way more effective tool than talking at them for 10 minutes which I used to do and used to try it the teacher in me and I've stopped doing that and I've just tried to give the moral struggle back to them. Which is a very good teacher move in my experience.

Good thank you. Thank you Heather thank you Dorothy um Dorothy in your piece we were really hoping you could dig into how you talk about the politics involved in caregiving and care receiving cause there are many politics and and also they need for living wages and how that fits in um. Yeah okay um I guess when I hear the word politics I I respond on multiple different levels um obviously the federal and provincial government I outline a number of ways that provincial government has failed me over the years and I I don't think I need to explain those um my struggle to get ODSP to cover my walker my struggle to get the um PSW care that I am entitled to now that it's been farmed out um and run by sort of independent organizations um I have no faith that conservative governments will ever provide anything remotely close to the care I need because it is specifically their agenda not to just as I learned as the union rep they want to cause a crisis in education in order to privatize education the conservative governments want to cause the crisis in health care in order to privatize health care because surprise surprise it gets them and their buddies rich Mike Harris former premier of Ontario his wife uh he and his wife both own massive Hair Care Health Care organizations he's one of the on the board of Chartwell she's just founded this new private nursing care and it goes on and on and on they intend them and their buddies to get rich Liberal and NDP governments would probably do a little better but the state has not invested in making sure that we live and live well and are cared for I don't think that absolves us from trying because my problem with the politics of care work envisioned by Disability Justice was really brought home to me during the pandemic and the isolation of the pandemic one I don't want 50 different people showing up at my door I don't want the risk to them I don't want the risk to me covet hangs in the air for as much as 12 hours anybody who came into my apartment during that time would be at risk so nobody comes in but me and my caregiver once a week and I absolutely do not want after having to be on the phone constantly to try to get a PSW during covid I absolutely do not want to be part of the organization of care work the um the way it's usually envisaged by Disability Justice is somebody comes and helps you with this and then you go and help somebody with that and then somebody else goes and helps somebody over there no I can't go anywhere and I can't help anybody with anything so um a part of that and my friends um even though I have plenty of them you know don't look at me like I don't have any friends I have plenty of them they're my age and they need help themselves or they're at too high risk to come and help me and I would never put them in risk to come and help me so again that's like I said at the beginning the framework of Disability Justice care work breaks down for people my age under covid it does not work and I feel like a traitor and I feel so sad to say that because I believed in the in it as aspirational for so long and I still do but it's not going to come into my lifetime before my lifetime is over so my position now is that we need paid unionized well-respected professional well-educated caregivers to come and provide the consistent one-on-one care to people like me that's what we need and we need to demand that of governments expecting they will fail us but we need to continue demanding of governments because already exhausted older and disabled people cannot properly look after already exhausted old and disabled people it just it's not going to work so I I guess that's my best answer to politics that it's about governmental politics and about community politics and I respect and appreciate the number of disabled people and their close friends and family that look after each other but that can't be where it ends because it leaves people like me nowhere without any care at all so there has to be some kind of way that we can continue to insist the governments provide the decent health care that Tommy Douglas envisioned for all of us. Yeah I agree with that

and that I myself rely on daily attending care but I you almost have to exaggerate on your assessment to get the care you need to get the basic care you need so

and their poorly paid and I've often had new immigrants who were nurses and should be nurses right so there's a whole lot of um justice issues tied up in in government funded um care providers so thank you for raising that. Your comments raise two thoughts for me if I can jump in yeah one is the ongoing challenge of of being disabled and trying to engage with politics when we are all tired and yeah overworked and uh under-resourced and often stuck in our homes and often stuck in our beds because of lack of care and lack of mobility devices and all of those things and the the challenge of even having the voice like it's 23 of our population and yet our voices are effectively missing from every conversation it's a really big challenge and I don't raise that to uh say that that I have any solutions for it but just I think it needs to be named in this conversation about politics and disability and caregiving and then the other thing is um the one experience of caregiving that my family has had in the last 10 years that's been like really solid and and supportive has been my daughter my youngest went to Carlton for University this year

they have worked so hard to build a model whereby you know provided you live in one of the residence buildings on campus they will have a caregiver to your space within 10 minutes 24-7 around the clock and she pays nothing extra for it they have somehow found a way of integrating that cost into the cost of residence that is shared across everyone and it it strikes me that that that might be a way of turning capitalism into a uh usable model uh whatever it is that they're doing uh how how can we how can we take that model that clearly works because the number of disabled students that go to Carlton proves its effectiveness and and uh come up with a creative way of doing this in a set of buildings or in a a community of of you know bungalows or what you know whatever it happens to be how could we how can we utilize some of those uh ideas to make it possible for people who don't uh wouldn't otherwise need to be in assisted living to not have to wait two years to go to assisted living.

Yeah I had fantasies about nationalizing my apartment building because my apartment building is full of disabled seniors and then we could have an on-site uh PSW or several on-site PSWs then we could have on-site physiotherapists down in the pool you know it there really would be all kinds of medical care on site that would be possible and we would still have our self-contained apartments and our independence but not be at risk and having to phone an ambulance if we had a problem um there's got to be some kind of of care model between a carceral model of assisted living and uh you're on your own babe there's got to be something in the middle that would last for a lot of people for a long time until they reach the kind of care need that would require some kind of community living setting yeah.

Thanks so much to both of you um I wanted to just quickly mention or or just sort of insert a little preview for a podcast episode that will be coming up soon um Laura McGregor and um Alan Jorgensen just wrote a book about um it's called um Beyond Saints and Superheroes uh it's about supporting parents with children with disabilities and I I as you're both talking I was just thinking about well they'll be coming on the podcast in a little bit but as you're both talking I was just thinking about sort of some of the things that Laura was talking about what she really needed when because she had a profoundly disabled child that she raised at home and she said that she really wanted the church to come in and do really sort of simple basic things for her it wasn't um astronomical she had just asked that people would she really wanted people just to come and help her fold the laundry she really needed people to come and help her do yard work um instead of just like um kind of like bring ringing the doorbell dropping a casserole and running away which is what a lot of people at church were doing and so she really wanted the people instead of dropping the casserole to come in and have a cup of coffee with her um so um I think how I feel in these conversations sometimes I get very overwhelmed and I think oh the system is so broken there's no way the church could ever do anything and then I need to take it I need to check myself I need to take a couple of steps back and I need to think about what Laura wrote and that is we can have somebody come over and help fold laundry or do the yard work or not ring the doorbell and run away so some of these things are um some of these ways the church can step in and help I don't think the church can fix everything um but I think that some of these simple ways are things that are we can and our listeners can think about um stepping in and helping to provide community and connection and I think too about what Dorothy said faith

communities can be involved in advocacy with regard to the provincial and federal government around health care but just around other care care which isn't so on and so forth so

there's always something to do if you don't want to fold laundry you can call you MP you know or do both of them. But if you do want to fold laundry I've got five loads sitting ready to go!

Well our last question for you both is if you have any questions for each other so uh Heather I might ask you to begin do you have any questions for Dorothy? I I wanted to start by mentioning that I was reading Dorothy's story and I realized we have some very distinct points of overlap because I was also a redhead and I also had surgery at Sick Kids on my feet to try to make very twisted an d very unusable feet into something vaguely usable I guess um and although it was 24 years after you were born um Dr Rang and Dr Salter continued to practice uh at in Orthopedics and I have met Dr Salter uh a very very very sweet man um and uh so I I just had to I had to put that out there we have these these points of overlap and and like you managed to get to a point where I could you know walk with a cane and then just pushing the stroller strollers make fabulous walkers by the way if you have ever in that place where you're not quite able to convince the government to get you a walker but you still have a young child just use a really good stroller um and then gradually my mobility has gone down and I now use a power wheelchair but but I I just had to put that out there we share some of these things and that that delights me because I would love to share some of what I see in you in in 24 years from now!

I don't know any specific questions for you I don't think that's where my brain went when I was reading your paper I just kept going oh and that and that yes I just kept seeing the similarities. Well that's lovely thank you and and I'm thrilled to know that Dr Salter's legacy lives on um he's won every award under the sun some prestigious medical awards he's been made and you know Order of Companion of Canada or whatever that thing is he's won so many awards and even uh um three months ago I was at another doctor who took my foot and looked at it and said Dr Salter did this? It would be literally half a century ago that that man did my first surgery and so his name lives on and he's wonderful and I'm thrilled that that you had a chance to meet him um I likewise don't really have any specific questions for you but I always like near the end to sort of say to people what was there anything that got left out that you would like to mention? Um

I don't know that what I left out belongs in the same piece I think there's a second piece um

after 22 years of being on parent boards there are there are so many times when I carefully hold my tongue and I just keep going and I leave out so much of my experiences from those spaces because parents aren't in a place in terms of their own mental health where they can hear it where where my words could be anything other than interpreted as guilting or shaming or one more burden which I don't want to put on anyone but I think I think we do as a society and especially in the church need to start having some conversations about

what the impacts of our theology and our our own unprocessed mental health issues have on the well-being of children being raised with disabilities in Canada um we live in a country where we have banned conversion therapy quite rightly but not banned ABA and IBI which are formulated under the same principles um and and use the same coercive techniques and and strategies to them and I but it's not just kids with autism who are who are struggling as a result of this I I had a conversation a couple weeks ago with a young woman who uh was raised with CP and we were talking about the the immense effort and energy that is put into making sure that children walk uh even when that effort to making sure that they walk with as few uh aids as possible results in incredible pain and it's steals away all of their social time because of therapeutic uh in interventions and then that results in social delays and um and loneliness and isolation and mental health issues and all of these things and and I think you know at the bottom of it there's there's just all of this ableism that is so ingrained that parents are passing on from from generations even before even before you from the sounds of it that was really helpful actually here your your take on that but I think I think what is what isn't in this piece is all of the rest of it uh is all of the rest of those the conversations that I think we do need to start having around parenting and disability that are really hard to have in a way that honors and respects the enormous effort and sacrifice and pain and loss that is there for our parents of kids with disabilities without um doing so in a way that decenters those with disabilities entirely from the picture. Yeah so can I turn the question around and ask you what you left out?

Um I don't usually leave a lot of things out

I I would guess the only thing I will say is that I am so appreciative of uh the work that all of you are doing I really appreciated I you know I was raised in the United Church I was an explorer and um I look very fondly back on on the warm and accepting kind of place that the church was to me when I was young and I really do think that in covid nobody else is grappling with the moral questions right with the question of right and wrong with the question of eugenics as right and wrong which is what we need to be grappling with under covid because we're increasingly living in a cruel world where the boomer remover was actually called that the boomer remover will cull the weak from the world and I'm one of those people and nobody seems to care if I get culled so it's so important that that there are spaces that look from a theological point or from a moral point or just simply from a point of view who does this hurt who does this help how can we help and I I am appreciative of that work and and I thank all of you for continuing to do it.

Yeah there's so much more we could take into today but thank you Dorothy and Heather for

having this conversation as an example of how we can better better care for ourselves and for each other and and more supports there should be to make make our lives possible right and and have them seen as worthy in in church and in society so thank you and I hope you write for us again one day because your writing and your your um

presence here is so much appreciated so blessings to you and blessings to our listeners this day.