You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Jessica Slice, a disability activist and the author of Unfit Parent, a Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. We discuss the effect of Jessica’s disability on her life and parenting, and what non-disabled parents can learn from her about parenting.Know s...
You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Jessica Slice, a disability activist and the author of Unfit Parent, a Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. We discuss the effect of Jessica’s disability on her life and parenting, and what non-disabled parents can learn from her about parenting.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Intro + Jessica Slice and her book
* 00:02 — Jessica’s disability story and diagnoses
* 00:05 — Wheelchair, identity shift, and living as disabled
* 00:06 — The disability paradox explained
* 00:08 — Perfectionism, capitalism, and happiness
* 00:11 — Disability culture vs. hustle culture
* 00:13 — Becoming a parent unexpectedly (foster → newborn)
* 00:14 — Why early parenting can be easier for disabled parents
* 00:18 — Skill overlap: disability + parenting
* 00:20 — Myths about disabled parenting
* 00:26 — Fear of care, aging, and needing help
* 00:27 — Parenting and interdependence
* 00:29 — Community support and parenting
* 00:30 — Letting go of control and certainty
* 00:32 — Everyone needs help
* 00:34 — Advice to younger parent self
* 00:35 — Where to find Jessica
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Jessica’s books
* Jessica’s Substack
* Jessica on A Slight Change of Plans
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* Instagram
* Facebook Group
* YouTube
* Website
* Join us on Substack
* Newsletter
* Book a short consult or coaching session call
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Podcast Transcript:
Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Jessica Slice. She is a mother, a writer, and a disability activist, and the author of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. I love this book and I’ve been telling everyone about it. I highly recommend you pick up a copy. We will link to it in the show notes. Until then, have a listen to my interview with Jessica, where we talk about disability and parenting and what non-disabled parents can learn from her about parenting. Whether you are interested in learning more about disability culture, or want some new and somewhat startling answers to the question, “Why is parenting so hard?” I think you’ll have a lot to think about after listening to this episode. Let’s meet Jessica.
Sarah: Hi Jessica. Welcome to the podcast.
Jessica: Thanks so much for having me.
Sarah: I’m so glad to have you here. If you wouldn’t mind just starting out by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Jessica: Of course. My name’s Jessica Slice, and I’m really happy to be here. I am an author and a speaker and just write in general about disability and perfectionism and our shared fragility. I live in Toronto with my two kids and my husband, and we have a dog named Honey Puppy, and I’m, yeah, really happy to be here.
Sarah: It’s so good to have you here. So your book about parenthood and disability—I was so surprised that I know so little about disability. So maybe you could tell us about your disability and then your journey to becoming a parent.
Jessica: Yeah, of course. So I became disabled at 28. And so I have this real before-and-after story, and I also feel like because I don’t have a congenital disability—or I didn’t have a disability until 28—that I have a perspective from that specific position. You know, I grew up having a body that was generally accepted, generally welcomed, that I didn’t have accommodation or accessibility issues.
But when I was 28, I was on a hike. I developed heat exhaustion, and I just became extremely sick. So the day before the hike, I was active. I went for a seven-mile run. I was on vacation, and then the day after the hike, it was hard to even walk down the hallway. I just had this range of debilitating symptoms: extreme dizziness, nausea, this sense of kind of like floating above myself, unexplained fevers. My legs were going numb.
And I saw doctors and, well, I assumed I just needed to recover from the heat exhaustion. But then I didn’t. And so I just started seeing doctors and no one knew what was wrong. They said maybe I was just stressed. And this went on, and I ended up not recovering ever. Like I still have many of those symptoms now.
But about two years into that, I finally saw someone who diagnosed me with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which—at that time, it was 2013 that I got diagnosed—it was not very well known. It’s better known now because it comes along with long COVID in a lot of patients, and so more people are talking about it.
But then two years after that—or one year after that—my little sister developed the same symptoms that I had, and it seemed rare that two people would have this exact same sudden onset. And so our doctor at Duke sent us to a geneticist at Duke, and that geneticist diagnosed us with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disorder. And so that causes a lot of widespread pain, a lot of dislocations, some vascular issues—well, not as severe as certain types of EDS, but can cause POTS. And so I have, I sort of have two disabilities that are connected, and in a lot of people with EDS, they end up developing POTS.
And then in 2018—so for a long time, for those first seven years I was disabled—I just sort of shrunk my life to fit my body’s needs, which I, which was okay. But I, I just didn’t go anywhere where I would need to stand or walk or be upright.
And then seven years in, when my child—and I’ll, I’ll explain meeting her—but when she was one, I was like, I think I wanna go more places. And so then I got my first power wheelchair, and that made it so I could go on walks and go to stores and go to restaurants, or go to her ballet classes, or just be in the world a bit more.
And so, and it was around that time that I really started identifying as disabled and not just sick. Mm-hmm. And that was a real transformation for me. It was a switch from feeling like I had this body that worked and stopped working to having a body that had switched from one identity to a different identity. What a trip that—yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Because you had experienced life as both disabled and non-disabled, you have a particular insight into something that I, that you wrote about, which is the disability paradox. Mm-hmm. Can you talk about that? Because I think if somebody had been disabled their whole life, it might be harder for non-disabled people to believe that the disability paradox is true. But because you’ve been—no, I’m serious. Like, it is kind of funny, but because you’ve had both types—mm-hmm—of lives, can you explain what the disability paradox is and any—just any thoughts on what you think listeners should know about that?
Jessica: Yeah, I mean, God, I could talk about this all day. I’ll try not to be too long-winded about it. But the disability paradox is this philosophical phenomenon where disabled people are far more satisfied with our lives than people would expect. And in fact, when you measure satisfaction, disabled people are equal to or more satisfied than non-disabled people. But that really goes against sort of our collective assumptions, which is that the very worst thing is to be disabled.
You know, even from the time someone gets pregnant, you say, “Well, I don’t care if it’s a boy or girl, as long as it’s healthy.” And I don’t wanna, like, take away from how hard it is to have a sick child, but the irony is: being a disabled person doesn’t end up diminishing life satisfaction across the board.
There are disabled people who don’t like their lives. There are non-disabled people who don’t like their lives. There are parts of disability that bring suffering. There are parts of kind of every person’s life that brings suffering. And so it’s not that disability never has hard parts, but it’s that it’s overly reductive. It overly flattens a person to say that being disabled is worse than non-disabled.
In my experience, before I was disabled, I had this kind of overly shiny and successful life. I stumbled into a career in my twenties where I was making a ton of money. I was married to my high school sweetheart. I was out with friends every weekend. I sort of like, there were all these things you should try to achieve, and I was just like, I had done.
Sarah: And you were on a cruise in Santorini when you got sick. Like, I mean, that’s like a perfect example of how shiny your life was, right?
Jessica: Yeah, it was. And earlier that year I had been celebrated in Chicago for being one of the best realtors in the country. Like, I just had—It was like someone had, you know, set up these things that we’re told will make us happy, and I was checking them off. And I had this really deep sense of—it was dissatisfaction or suffering, or kind of like rottenness inside me. And it was because I felt like I never was getting to the place I needed to go. Like there was this level of perfection, this level of joy, enjoyment that I couldn’t quite access. Like every trip was not quite good enough. Every accomplishment was not quite enough. It was like I was so hard on myself.
And I think part of that was being so proximate to what the world says we should be. And then when I became disabled—I mean, there were many excruciating years. There were the two years looking for a diagnosis, when I was getting sicker and sicker and sicker. There was the falling apart of my first marriage. There was losing an income. You know, I went for years without reliable income, living on very little a month. I mean, there was real suffering there.
But what it also did: it took me off this track I had been on, and then I had to form something else there. And I was forced to be still with myself. I was forced to tell the truth to myself for the first time. I just had a lot of time like knocking around my own brain.
And for me, once—especially once I was able to have money to live on and have a life, have a diagnosis, you know, have a life that felt like I could survive it—once I was there, it was wild, but I found myself so much happier than I had been before.
And I think a lot of that was because I liked myself and knew myself for the first time. And I had just sort of jumped off the track. I had, like, leapt from—or been forced off, pushed off—the track from this thing that I was almost good enough at to whatever was true for just me in my life. And there was such honesty there that even the hard parts felt survivable. It was like I was knocking up against something—(I shouldn’t clap on the mic)—but I was knocking up against something solid in myself. And that felt like a way I could live.
And so the disability paradox makes sense to me. Not that everyone has to have this wild change that I did or totally change their mindset, or I don’t mean to overly silver-line what can be a very difficult experience. But I think the real thing is: we do a very, very, very bad job of predicting what will make us happy. And the thing that often ends up working is just honesty and getting to know ourselves and being stuck with our own stillness. And that sometimes disability—or often disability—fosters a truthfulness that can feel like getting free.
Sarah: I love that. In your book you talk a lot about—I mean, it would be so easy for me to go off on this tangent, but I’m not going to—about capitalism and our culture of individualism. And do you think that part of the disability paradox is that you step away when you’re disabled, you need to step away from that? You said you stepped off the track and I immediately thought of the rat race of getting more. Mm-hmm. Having more, producing more, and not needing anybody else—that is capitalism.
Jessica: Absolutely. I mean, if we believe that more money and more purchases and more perfection in ourselves will bring happiness, then we never get there and we end up just spending a lot of money, which feeds a system that wants us to spend a lot of money. But disability culture as a whole fosters community, fosters creativity, fosters, you know, like a “crip time,” like a slower different pace of life. It’s like there’s all these kind of anti-capitalist sentiments inherent in disability culture, which I think really pushes against that. And I think that’s a huge part of it. I mean, as you know, my book—I sort of like, I say that over and over and over again. I think it’s massive. Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a, it’s such an interesting—it’s a good segue, too, to talking about parenting. Because I think a lot of the things that make—and this is what your book is a lot about—a lot of the things that make parenting hard and not enjoyable also come from the same source of capitalist and individualist culture and society. Mm-hmm.
And in your book you have a chapter called “The First Week.” You were a foster parent and you unexpectedly got a newborn who is now—Mm-hmm—your child now. But you weren’t expecting a newborn, so you weren’t prepared for a newborn, and you had to kind of scramble and get everything together in that first week. Mm-hmm. It was a bit of a shock and surprise, I think, for you.
But even with that, you talked about how your first week was pretty relaxing and nesting and beautiful. And then as you started to talk to people—maybe you could take it up from here—you sort of talked to non-disabled people about their first week with their newborn and saw quite a contrast.
Jessica: Yeah. You know, I started that chapter not knowing what I would find. I thought there might be a difference between the struggles of the first week between disabled and non-disabled people. And I mean, a major caveat is that each person has their own unique experience. Painting with too wide a brush is never great.
But in my interviews, and what I have found since, is that in many cases disabled people have an easier time adjusting to parenthood than non-disabled people, at least at the beginning. And I think a lot of that is because the first week sort of brings to the surface realities that disability has already brought to the surface.
When you—particularly people who give birth—so if you give birth and you suddenly have a fragile body for the first time, and you’re taking care of a fragile baby, and like the baby’s fragility is just so evident—I don’t know if you felt this way, but with both of my kids, it’s like you’re watching them breathe like a maniac. Like they breathe so fast and slow and pause and they turn color—beat through the top of their head.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Jessica: Oh, yeah. Horrifying. And you’re just sort of confronted with these bodies and how fragile we all are. And you’re also confronted with how much we need other people.
And you know, one of my favorite disability scholars, Jennifer Fink, talks about how fear of disability is fear of needing care and/or fear of giving care. The first week is like: you need care. Particularly if you’ve given birth, you are giving constant care to this baby. And you’re sort of in—it’s like you are transported into this other world of fragility and interdependence and uncertainty.
And if you’re disabled, that’s sort of where you’ve already been living because of your own body and because of navigating the world. And if you’re not disabled, I think it can feel particularly jarring. And it can feel like, “How will I ever survive this? How can I ever get to the other side of this? Who am I now? Will I ever find solid ground again?”
And I think that disability is a protective factor there. I think it really helps you.
Whether those changes—I know with my daughter, she had some health issues at the beginning and I just had this sense like, “She’ll be fine.” We also didn’t know if she was going to be a—like how long she would be with us. It could have been weeks or months, and I sort of found myself okay with that. At first it was this weird sense of: all I need to do is love her and be here. And I know that sounds overly shiny.
And in the book I interview this woman who had volunteered to help us adjust. So I posted on the neighborhood listserv, said we needed supplies. This woman, Renee, replied and said, “I’m a doula in the neighborhood,” or a night nurse. “Can I come help you with your first night and help you get set up?” It’s—yeah—amazing.
And so she came and set up a bottle station, and she came in. And then my husband’s mom ended up paying for a couple nights a week of Renee to come and help us for those first few months, which I know not everyone gets. But you still have a lot of nights without help. Yeah.
But so she was there a lot during those early days. And so I interviewed her for the book and I was like, “Was it really as magical as I remember?” And I was sort of afraid she’d be like, “No, you were a disaster.” But she said, “No, I have never seen anything like it.” She said coming into your house was like just walking into—there was like—you were just like reading poems and so calm and happy and in love. And she said she really couldn’t wrap her mind around how different it was.
And that made me feel good that my recollection had been accurate.
Sarah: You weren’t rose-coloring it. You had a great quote on Maya Shanker’s podcast—which, what a great podcast to be on. That’s one of my favorite podcasts that I listen to.
Jessica: Oh, she’s the best. We’ve become friends since.
Sarah: Have you?
Jessica: She’s really—
Sarah: Oh, she seems lovely from listening to her podcast. We’ll put a link to the episode in the show notes for anyone who wants to listen to it. Great. But you said something on her podcast—so I’m gonna quote you back to you—that you said that you thought the first week, and parenting in general, was easier for—or could be. I know we’re making a lot of generalizations, but could be easier in general for disabled people because you said the bodies and minds of babies and kids are needy and unpredictable, and a disabled body and mind is also needy and unpredictable, and that you saw there was a practical overlap in skills. I thought that really distilled down the idea that you’re talking about just now.
Jessica: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think it’s kind of like we’ve just been practicing for this without realizing it.
Sarah: And I think that’s the thing that’s so hard: for parents, that needy and unpredictability is what makes the adjustment to parenting so hard for non-disabled people who aren’t used to—again, to the capitalist and individualistic structure—Mm-hmm. We think we can control everything. Mm-hmm. And perfectionism is another theme in your book too, right? Mm-hmm. Of like, we can control everything and we can make it all perfect. Mm-hmm. And if you’re disabled, you’ve probably had to let go of that idea of control and perfection.
Jessica: I get maybe one email a week from a person whose parent was disabled, or is disabled. And the one I got this week said, “Everyone thinks their mom is the best. But, Jessica, if I may, my mom was the best. She was patient, kind, and smart. She would happily read to me or listen to silly stories or let me sit on her lap for as long as I wanted.” And then she said, “As an adult and mother, I have always had the feeling that my mom was a better mother somehow because of her disability, but I have also always felt guilty even thinking that, like I was somehow celebrating her having MS—a disease that took her from us. The way you describe disabled parenting and its creativity, resourcefulness, and necessary rejection of capitalist hustle reads at some points to me like a love letter to my own mom.”
Sarah: Aw, that is so sweet. Incredible. So lovely. Yeah. That’s really lovely.
Jessica: And it feels—’cause there’s this feeling writing the book of like, “What if my kids hate having a disabled mom?” And I’m like, “No, it’s actually great having me as a mom.” And getting these emails from people saying, “No, this is what I experienced,” mm-hmm, that there’s something in the way disability forces a rejection of hustle culture for many of us that allows us to be the kind of present and slow and flexible parents—or at least that I could have never been before.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. There’s so much in your book too about the challenges with the medical system and Child Protective Services, that people who are disabled get their kids taken away at way higher rates than people who are not disabled, and have trouble accessing good medical care, reproductive services. You know, there’s a long list of things that are harder for disabled people. So I’m glad that there’s something that feels like you’ve got a boost in that, that you’ve—Yeah. It’s like a short circuit to things that I hope parents in our community slowly start to figure out in terms of the perfectionism, mm-hmm, and the slowing down. You were forced to do all of that.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I do sometimes feel self-conscious when I see the way my peers parent—when I see them making these perfect little lunches and these divided-up lunch boxes, or doing elf on the shelf, or these kind of versions of parenting that I just—I don’t have the energy or capacity to have as part of our lives. And I can feel like, “Are my kids missing out from this type of parenting?” And maybe in some ways they are. You know, nothing simple.
But I know I would have done those things. The version of me in my twenties would have done those things, but she would’ve also been a lot less patient. She would’ve had a lot less time for just sort of wasting hours and being together. And I don’t know that there—I have an ability to be present with my kids that I wouldn’t have had before.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think you—I heard you say on Maya Shanker’s podcast that you and your husband one weekend were like, “Oh my gosh, it was such a busy weekend,” but then you realized that you had only gone to the park and met some friends or something. But I think that’s amazing. Like, I think that kids would trade more time with their parents and more connection time, whatever that looked like, for all of the activities and all of the stuff. Like, I really do.
Jessica: Thanks. Yeah. We don’t do very much. Our kids are in no activities, and who knows what they’ll end up being mad about as adults.
Sarah: So what myths about disabled parenting do you want to dispel? You said a lot of non-disabled parents think that disabled parenting would be like—they’re just who they are, but without being able to see, was an example you said in your book, right? And so—I don’t know—maybe in that direction: what do you—yeah.
Jessica: Oh, that’s great. So yeah. And I found myself feeling this way. You know, when I interviewed blind parents for the book, I was imagining my life, but without vision. Mm-hmm. And when people imagine me as a wheelchair user, as a parent, they probably imagine their life, but just adding a wheelchair, and that’s not really how things work. We adapt based on who we are and our needs and our whole life is sort of built around that.
And so there’s a level of creativity. There’s a level of building from the ground up. I think people really underestimate our ability as humans to build and to create and to problem-solve in community. You know, I have a lot of close relationships with other disabled parents and we problem-solve together, and I think that—I think it’s more possible than people imagine.
I was watching a friend of mine, Jessica, do a reel recently where she went through her face cream nighttime routine, and she is a quadriplegic and so she has some use of her hands but can’t rotate in certain ways. And she was walking through which bottles she can open and that she puts them on her sink and then dips her thumb in and kind of puts it on her face and then—and it took a very long time.
And I also—I don’t have a very complex face routine. So in that way it was like, I was like, “I would never do that.” But I thought, “Oh my gosh, she must be so tired doing that every night.” And I found myself thinking about her routine through my body. But then I thought, “No, I’m doing the thing.” It’s not her routine through my body; it’s her routine through her body, which she lives in.
And we all just live in the bodies we have and get used to it. You know, like when you’re walking around your house, you’re not like, “This would be easier to clean up if I could fly,” or, “If I had wheels on my feet,” or whatever. We just live in our own bodies. And I think it’s a different way to think about disability.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. I’m so glad I read your book because I didn’t know how much I didn’t think about disability. Do you know what I mean? And that just reminded me when you said, “We live in our own bodies,” and it’s so useful to be able to see the world in a different way through somebody else’s eyes a little bit.
I was actually reading your book at a cafe yesterday and I got up to go to the bathroom and I realized that the bathroom had a handicap sign on the door, but it had a piece of furniture that was outside the doorway that was blocking the door. Yeah. So that somebody in a wheelchair wouldn’t have been able to get through the doorway.
Jessica: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: You know, I don’t know. It’s just stuff like that. It’s so good to—
Jessica: Oh my gosh, that’s constant. Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jessica: Or you go into a bathroom like that and there it’s where they store all the supplies for the restaurant, so you can’t actually put your wheelchair inside.
Sarah: Right. It’s too crowded. Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. And the thing about disability is it’s coming for us all. The only way you live a life without disability is if you die tragically one day. Otherwise your body—all of our bodies—change at some point. Yeah. And we, and our needs and capacity shift. I mean, you know, even you—like, I would imagine at this point your needs, your capacities are different than they were 20 years ago. And I think our discomfort with that ends up hurting ourselves too, because we have such fear of aging, such fear of need, such fear of all the ways we change, and that’s just part of being a human with a body.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you talk about that fear of disability, and I think it’s the same with fear of aging, fear of care, right? Mm-hmm. Fear of needing care. Mm-hmm. And, mm-hmm, can you talk about the care aspect—talk a little bit about parenting and how you see non-disabled parenting as people are suffering because of that lack of care that we have?
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for all parents there’s this sense that you should be able to provide what your kids need without assistance, and that there is a distinction between people who give care and people who need care. And that a mom in particular is a person who gives care and doesn’t need it.
And I think what disability forces to the surface—particularly those who have some care needs like me—is: I give care and I need care, and that is part of my daily life. And needing care does not hinder my ability to be a valuable member of my family or a good mom. And I think it dispels that myth, I guess, that you have to be one or the other.
But I think if all parents could reject that binary of caregivers or care receivers, then it would mean that parenting didn’t feel as impossible, or didn’t have such an impossible standard, that weakness were allowed, or dependence were allowed, or interdependence.
And I think it would just change how we think about parenting in general because there’s this feeling, I believe, that particularly moms have to be all-powerful and limitless and perfect—and that it is a failure in the very definition of what it is to be a parent to start to need support and care.
Sarah: That’s so true. I live in a community of about 700 people and our houses are all very close together and we all know way more about each other than perhaps you might want your neighbors knowing about you. Mm-hmm. But at the same time, it is a community of care.
And I was reflecting on how my first week didn’t feel that hard, but I also had neighbors who organized dinners brought to us hot at six o’clock every night. And my in-laws lived down the street, and I had friends who lived nearby who could come over and help and hold the baby. What a difference it is to live in a community where people help each other.
We lived temporarily in Vancouver for a year, and the night before we were moving back, we realized that we had gotten—in trouble—with being packed and ready for the moving truck to come and called the one person that we knew who was in town and said, “Can you come over and help us? Like, we’re in trouble. The packing—we’re really behind.” And he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m watching a movie. I can’t come.”
And I realized: back in our old community, I could have put something out on our E-group for our neighborhood, and I would’ve had 30 people—I kid you not—people who I don’t even really know very well who would’ve been like, “I’ll help you. I’ll help you.”
For me, I don’t think that my motherhood was as lonely or as difficult because I live in a community. And people generally don’t live in a community like that anymore.
Jessica: No. Oh, that’s an excellent point. I think disability forces interdependence. But I mean, the point I try to make with my book is you don’t have to be disabled to have these values of creativity and interdependence and rejection of hustle culture. And it sounds like those are some of your inherent values too.
And yeah. I mean, community eases so many of those burdens. And not seeing the need for your neighbors as evidence that you’re not suited for motherhood, but just that you’re a person with limits.
Sarah: Yeah. I would get, sometimes I would feel lonely and just go out with the baby in the baby carriage. Yeah. Find someone to talk to. Just—yeah. Yeah.
And I think that can be one of the answers too: how to make non-disabled parenting easier is to try to find and make community if possible. But are there any other things that you can think of that you think would be helpful?
Jessica: I think reckoning with your own fragility and the uncertainty of life is a huge part of it, I think. So much of parenting heartache comes from this feeling that there’s a way it should be with your kids, a way it should be with yourself. And then when you veer off of that, it feels intolerable.
And you know, there’s kind of the early parts of it. Like you don’t know what your kids’ educational needs will be, or their physical needs, or their sleep needs, or their anything needs, or their food sensitivity. You know, you don’t know any of that. But then that keeps going all the way to what is very hard to swallow, which is: we don’t know that our kids will be okay, and we don’t know that we will be okay. And that is terrible. And it is also true.
And I think so much of what we do in life and in parenthood is this desperate attempt to pretend that we’re not mortal and pretend that we’re not fragile. And to act like if we try hard enough, we can insulate our kids from suffering and from pain or from illness, or from, God forbid, death.
And I think there are ways we protect ourselves and protect our kids, but a lot of it is not protection. A lot of it is like this desperate attempt to close our eyes to what is true. And I think one of the most important—and one of the hardest—things I’ve done is confront that. Confront how little I control in my kids’ lives. Mm-hmm.
And there are ways we—and some of that’s just internal. Some of it’s poetry and journaling and just looking at it. And then some of it is actions we take.
Sarah: Just before we close, I was looking at my notes just to make sure that I asked you everything that I wanted to ask you. And I came across this really beautiful quote from your book that I had written down that I think really encapsulates something that we’ve just been talking about. And you said: “The problem isn’t that disabled people need too much help to parent safely. The problem is that society refuses to admit that everybody does.”
And I think that’s really beautiful to think: we all need help, and so many people are struggling because they think they should just be able to do it all themselves. And that we were not—we weren’t made to parent in isolation.
Jessica: No. And we weren’t made to solve our parenting problems with purchases. Mm-hmm. Or just working harder, or sleeping less, or optimizing our days or being more efficient. Like that—there is no there, there when you’re looking for the answer down that path.
Sarah: Yeah. And that’s what I mean—capitalism sells us that idea that if you have the—
Jessica: Yeah.
Sarah: You know, the perfect tool or stroller or whatever it is, then life is better and easier.
So thank you for your book. It’s a question that I ask all my guests, which is: if you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what would you tell yourself? What piece of advice would you give yourself back in those early days?
Jessica: It would be to get a wheelchair sooner. Yeah. Gosh, I missed that first year out in the world with her. Mm-hmm. And I wish I had had it sooner.
Sarah: What made you not get it sooner?
Jessica: I never considered it. Mm-hmm. Not once did I consider a wheelchair. I thought: whatever I could do with my own body was what I deserved to have access to.
Sarah: So—
Jessica: And I remember—yeah. And then I said to my husband at one point, “If only there was like a chair that I could be on that could recline and was cushioned and I could move around on it.” And he’s like, “I think that’s just literally a wheelchair.”
Sarah: I love that. Yeah. So, yeah. So you were still holding onto the “I can do it all.” Even with your disability, you’re still holding onto “I can just do it and grit through it and”—
Jessica: Well, no. So it wasn’t even—’cause I didn’t do any, like, I didn’t go places. Mm-hmm. I thought—not that I can do it all. I accepted my limitations, but then I made my life only as small as what I could handle with my own body. Right. I hadn’t considered that there are tools that would open up the world to me again.
Sarah: Well, I’m glad you got a wheelchair. And, me too, I’m glad you wrote your book. I really recommend it to everyone. And where’s the best place for people to go and find out more about you and what you do?
Jessica: My website is jessicaslice.com. I’m on Instagram and post when I can convince myself to. But I do write very regularly on my Substack, which you can find under my name, Jessica Slice, on Substack. And I write about parenting and about disability and about the poems I’m reading, and I really love that community there.
Sarah: Do you write poetry?
Jessica: No, I’ve never tried, but I read poetry every day and it’s a huge anchoring point in my day.
Sarah: Maybe when you have more—when you’re not in the thick of parenting small children—you should give it a try.
Jessica: Maybe. It sounds so daunting.
Sarah: Well, I mean, you’re a wonderful writer, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were poems in there also.
Jessica: Thanks.
Sarah: Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica: Thank you.
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