My presentation on Friday was part of a panel about mommy blogging. There were five of us; the other four covered mommy blogging as a genre, how blogging about mothering publicly can affect your mothering, mommy blogging as folk art, and how advertising is beginning to affect mommy blogging. My topic was the experience of writing about mothering a child who is, in some way, different–whether it be disability or illness or just an undiagnosable genetic syndrome–on the internet.

In one of those moments of serendipity–or perhaps sensitivity after exposing myself to this issue for a few months–yesterday there was a section in the Toronto Star about access to post-secondary education for students with disabilities, and how attitudes are slowly changing. The articles gave me a great deal of hope–perhaps we, as the last generation to expect students with differences or issues or delays to be segregated educationally, are the last of the dinosaurs, the last to feel uncomfortable in the presence of a child not regularly featured in Parents magazine. Perhaps stand-up comics who can’t stand up and PhD students who can’t spell without assistance will simply be accepted, normal parts of advanced education for our children, and workplaces will automatically accomodate them because schools have automatically accomodated them, and they expect the world to work that way.

Perhaps it will be like the second wave of feminism–not perfect, not fixing everything by any stretch, but accomplishing nonetheless such a sea change that the way things used to be, the world of lowered expectations and isolation and segregation, is no longer imaginable.

I hope so. Because when, after finishing that, I find this letter about the death of a man with primordial dwarfism, I dread the world my daughter will live in.

(I’ll come back and write about the actual panel and how it went once my co-presenters have had a chance to decompress and post their own talks, so that I can point to them. And parts of this post will end up on my own blog tomorrow–but I didn’t want anyone to think I’d had that heart attack. It actually all went very well.)

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