DISABILITY AND MOTHERHOOD-THE JOY AND PRIDE OF DISABLED MOTHERS

Even small children will be heard asking “where do babies come from?” they will always get different answers depending on their age, their culture, their social setting and so forth. Where babies come from is a “grey” area that leaves it so much of a “secret”, a kind of a “shame” yet a very sacred, joyous, and honourable experience to any woman, mark the words Any and Woman.

And in most if not all cases, it is even an area not to be mentioned when the woman in question has a disability. In most cases disability and motherhood are terms that sit very uncomfortably in the dictionaries of the society in which we live. In a debate that touches on disability and motherhood, there will always exist a doubt of how the two can co-exist. It is not only a question in the cultural beliefs as we could think some time back, we find that there are laws being passed by the most civilized nations to sterilize women with disabilities and barr them from becoming mothers.

A baby girl when born, she grows to love nurturing evrybody and everything that she comes accross , she will be seen doing what the mother does more than what the father does, she will be seen in the kitchen with the mother learning how to mix spices, she will be seen tending and nurturing her dolls, she will always present herself with a lot of feminine characters as matches her nature and finally she will grow into a woman who will want to get education, a job, and then become a home maker. One aspect of being a home maker is being a good wife to the husband and also a good mother to her children.

Being a mother is an honour, it is an inmeasurable joy, it is a call, it is a right as well as a taks. And in most cases we like thinking of women without disability whenever motherood is in question, the society that we live in, both culturally and socially, has sidelined women with disabilities and branded them as unfit to be mothers, and the fact is that even the most educated and the most civilized among us are yet to assimilate the fact that motherhood is not determined by the mental, physical, sensory or any other aspect of the human body that makes one look limited or unlimited in one way or the other.

By this I mean, it is a shocking reality that the most learned people among us-the LAWYERS and DOCTORS will look at a women with disabilities as unfit to both get babies or even to take care of a baby, in some places we find children being taken away from their mothers on grounds that the mother has a disability, and this is a decision that is made by the LAWYERS, on the other hand when a woman with a disability goes to seek health care services during her pregnancy the doctor will be heard asking who on earth inpregnated such a woman, and some will even say they never thought a disabled woman can get pregnant.

The above shows that accepting the reality of disability does not depend on education, it depends on the natural knowledge that a female is indeed the bearer of life, yes, this is because even the most illerterate ones will be very optimistic when they tend to their female animals in the farm (calves, kids from goats, lambs, kittens, puppies and all the female creatures) knowing that they will get a continuation in their folds only from the female animals. A wanting question comes here: how can a whole DOCTOR or LAWYER with the label of “LEARNED FRIEND” be so ignorant when dealing with a female human being as compared to a villager dealing with the female animals just because the woman in question has a disability.

I have a lot about this topic, today I heartly take my breathe to sigh in relief that women with disabilities are indeed beares of life as a call for any female creature on the face of earth, I salute all mothers and in a special way I salute disabled mothers.