Cross-Post: My Review of UNFIT PARENT
Because I wrote it and I make the copyright/republication decisions for the Massachusetts Review.
We’ve been traveling and I am collecting my thoughts for a regular post soon (spoiler alert: Amsterdam Airport leaves MUCH to be desired, vis a vis accessibility help). But I was also busy reading and then reviewing this fantastic book by
, which I published last week in , where I work as development director and all-around decision maker about republication stuff. And I have decided to cross-pot this review, for three reasons: 1) to drive more traffic to the MR site, which is great; 2) to boost the signal for Jessica’s book, which is great; and 3) to publish something this week without too much effort (which is also pretty great).Review of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World by Jessica Slice
When she was 28, Jessica Slice quite literally stumbled into disability while on a hike in Greece with her then-husband. Tired and hot after an hours-long trek, they turned a corner and were confronted by a pack of wild dogs. Though they managed to avoid attack by backing away and scrambling up a hill, the escape left them far out of their way with very limited water under a blazing sun. Upon return to their cruise ship, Slice devolved into a full-blown heat-stroke-type situation, far beyond the capacity of the ship’s infirmary to handle. The result? A massive, prolonged upset to her body’s internal regulation, culminating in months of medical appointments, increasingly debilitating symptoms, and a complete reversal of her previous able-bodiedness. Slice would go from active runner to wheelchair user. When she was finally diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS)-which affects blood pressure, heart rate, digestion, and temperature regulation to a dramatic degree–Slice found herself navigating a world indifferent, if not outright hostile, to her body’s new needs. Nonetheless, she fought to complete her graduate degree in social work, ended her first marriage, and decided to become a foster parent.
Thus begins Slice’s new book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World, a penetrating exploration of both the challenges of parenting as a disabled mother in an ableist world, and a useful guide to disability justice, activism, and personal acceptance of a new reality. For a book about parenting, Unfit Parent is slim on details of her adopted daughter’s foibles, and focuses instead on the difficulties of parenting from inside her body, in a society that does not believe her capable of doing so.
When Slice and her new husband, David, embark on foster parenting, the difficulties are immediate and practical: Attending the required orientation and training classes means figuring out how to do so without sitting upright, which leads to dizziness and possible loss of consciousness; the rooms often overheat due to faulty air conditioning, which leaves Slice nauseous and unable to focus. And of course, she must push back against a constant drum beat of “Perhaps you can’t do this,” rather than receiving accommodation (or the acknowledgement that parenting for everybody is very hard). Such barriers continue even after Slice and David get word that they not only completed the trainings, but are immediately due to receive a newborn in need of a home.
I want to pause here to point to a core strength of Slice’s book. While she makes clear the adorableness and excitement of infant K, she is careful to respect the baby’s privacy, noting that much of K’s story isn’t Slice’s to tell. Instead, Slice pivots to thinking through the obstacles she faces, contextualizing them within the wider concerns of disability justice and activism. Thus, what at first threatens to be a memoir-ish reverie of the pratfalls of parenting-while-disabled instead quickly and decisively establishes itself as a necessary contribution to the growing canon of disability writing.
Slice notes that this positioning of her work, and her attendant growing comfort with self-identifying as “disabled,” has its roots in the reading she did for an independent study while pursuing her Master’s in social work. Armed with a reading list of scholars and activists, Slice brings us on a journey of discovery that begins with Elizabeth Barnes’s Minority Body—“When it comes to disability, I’m not objective. And neither are you”—through Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, in which she rejects the notion that (to quote Slice) “queerness and disability are deviations from some normal way of being a person,” and are instead, “groups advocating for a more just world.” Within the framework provided by these ideas and others like them, Slice situates her own experiences and those of the many disabled parents she interviews.
From there, Unfit Parent takes readers through the more individual experience of bringing an infant home, and caring for a needy baby while inhabiting a needy body. Slice interweaves her own experiences with interviews of differently disabled parents, from a single mother with spina bifida to a couple who are both blind, raising sighted children. She makes clear, again and again, the fraught nature of parenting-while-disabled but also how, as she argues persuasively, disabled parents are often better equipped for parenting infants and children:
We must invite (or force) gatekeepers to adjust their understanding of what it means to be a capable parent. As disabled caretakers, we invite judgement when we leave the house with our children and, in some cases, these judgements can threaten custody of our children. The outside world is full of accessibility obstacles: stairs, heavy doors, and unnavigable crowds.
But at home, where we can mold our environments to fit our needs, we thrive. Many of us have been honing our creativity for decades, and we flex these muscle while parenting. . . . Constructing a living space that is safe and functional can be complex and involves constant innovation and creative thinking, but, as disabled people, we are practiced in problem-solving.
Slice also speaks to academics and activists to provide a full picture of both the capacity of disabled parents to rise to the challenges before them, and a harrowing exploration of the barriers, and at times outright punishments, inflicted by society when it comes to “allowing” such parents to care for their children. In one particularly awful moment, she discusses a blind mother’s experience in the hospital of trying to get her newborn to latch, or start breast-feeding. Undone by exhaustion and frustration, she tearfully asks a nurse for help. The nurse, rather than offering the guidance that nearly every new mother needs, calls Child Protective Services to report an unfit mother. Though the story ends well—the mother does not lose her child—the stakes are frighteningly clear.
Unfit Parent moves nimbly through a brief history of activism and an overview of the difficulties that continue to challenge disabled parents today, to broader social concerns that suggest darker realities. Slice invites readers to consider the purported “benefits” of prenatal testing, the CRISPR gene-editing breakthroughs, and the widening of medically assisted suicide availability, within the context of a social ideology that demands able-bodied independence above all else. Such advances can thus verge on eugenics: If one cannot exist without help, as most disabled parents or children cannot, should one exist at all? The great irony, which Slice makes clear throughout this wide-ranging book, is that there is no such thing as full independence, especially when it comes to parenting. We all need help and other people, regardless of our relative able-bodiedness. To assert otherwise, and to create punitive and disastrous systems as a result, is to render all of us overwhelmed, underprepared, and perhaps, ultimately unfit.
EMILY WOJCIK is the business manager for
, and the author of the Substack Wheelchair, Bound.
Sounds like a very interesting book.
Thank you so much for this Emily. The book sounds right up my street, as an adoptive disabled parent. My disability came after we adopted our daughter and I would like to write a piece about it, but am also mindful, like Jessica of respecting my daughters privacy, information and perspective, and yes, much of it not being my story to tell. So I keep stalling. Rebekah Taussig writes beautifully about this too. Ha, her Substack is called This Too! …