our limits are how love multiplies
a bite-sized Q&A with disability rights activist Jessica Slice
Like a lot of moms, I’m a limited-capacity woman with limitless feelings of incompetency. On dark days, I’m sure my girls wish I were a different person; less kale, more queso. I’m sure my girls like Rush better than me; he laughs louder, wakes earlier. I’m sure they wish they’d been adopted by a couple with an outdoor pool.
After cataloging an absurd list of concerns to my therapist once, she said gently, “I imagine every mother feels some pain over the gap between what she wants to give her children and what her capacity allows.” Of course. And yet I’ve spent whole days (a whole book) wondering: how much of this pain comes from the very real and humbling experience of being human and how much of it comes from the shaming cultural expectations that moms be superhuman—their bodies miracles of might, their love god-like with sacrifice? At the very least, it seems moms are meant to be morning people.
My friend Jessica Slice, an adoptive mom and disability rights activist living in Canada, has become a teacher for me in disentangling my sense of competency from our social scripts about capacity. In addition to essays in The New York Times, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan, she’s also contributed to the bestselling anthology, Disability Visibility, and has two picture books coming out in 2023 with Dial Press: This is How We Play and This is How We Talk. Both celebrate the beautiful and creative ways that disabled people live. To find more of her work, you can sign up for her newsletter, where she writes monthly about disabled parenting, or follow her on Instagram. You can also find her featured in my upcoming book, where there were not pages enough to fawn.
So, in this month’s Q&A from the book’s cutting room floor, you’ll hear more from Jessica about the negative self-beliefs that initially kept her from parenting, what gave her the idea to explore fostering, and why she thinks her disability makes her a better parent.
Imagine that: another reminder that our limits are how love multiplies.
Erin Lane: You’re an adoptive mother to a fantastically-dressed child named K. Did you always want to become a mom?
Jessica Slice: I didn’t. In fact, I always assumed I would not be a mom. For decades I believed that I would make a bad mom — I focused on my perfectionism and impatience and worried that I wouldn’t be loving enough. Thanks to a few transformative life events and lots of therapy, my harsh view of myself shifted in my early thirties and I started to reimagine what I wanted and was capable of.
Erin: Was there, like, a crystalline moment? Or a series of moments when you knew something new?
Jessica: Therapy allowed me to consider, without negative self-beliefs, what I wanted, and I realized that I did want to be a parent. The desire initially showed up as an ache in the center of my sternum.
Erin: I love that you can name where that desire took up residence in your body— especially given that, at that time, your relationship to your body was rapidly changing. Can you tell me more about that?
Jessica: In my late 20s, I became disabled and was eventually diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. Carrying a child is more complicated because of my health, and I visited specialists who said it might not be safe for me to give birth.
I wasn’t terribly disappointed after learning that — I never had a strong pull to be pregnant. But I was in a relationship at that time that ended, partially because he had a strong desire to be with someone who could be pregnant and give birth.
A few years later, in a new, stable relationship, I started to consider being a foster parent, in part, because I had watched you and Rush go through the process. We were living in Oakland, California and had a second bedroom. I felt strongly that if we had the time and space to parent, and there were people who need a home, we should provide that.
Erin: I remember you calling me when we were just a few months into fostering. I was so disoriented with all the praise. Like, people were alarmingly excited for me to be a mom of some kind. And foster moms! They’re often thought of as supermoms. But you were so sober about it. In fact, you gave me my favorite parenting compliment ever. You said something like, Huh, I thought fostering was for women nicer than you. But if you can do it, I don’t see why I can’t. What did you mean by that?
Jessica: Ha! I don’t know what I meant by that! It must be that I’ve always really admired the way you prioritize and value your own needs. I could learn a lot from you! I think I had subconsciously equated motherhood with the erasure of identity, and it seemed obvious to me that motherhood wouldn’t mean those things to you. You aren’t “nice” the way society shoehorns women into self-denial. It’s inspiring to watch.
Erin: You are correct; self-denial is not my spiritual gift. So, how did you meet your little man?
Jessica: K was our second foster child. We met her in March 2017. Our first had only left a few days prior when we got the call that there was a 1-week-old in the NICU that needed a place to stay temporarily. We agreed to meet K the next day, and she’s been ours ever since. When it became clear during her first months that she couldn’t reunify with family, we agreed to be adoptive parents. The early months with K were pretty magical. I felt like I knew her immediately, and the perfectionism and anxiety that I had feared never showed up. I was able to soak in the moments, and I will always feel very grateful for those early days.
Erin: You’ve written gorgeously about mothering with a disability. I loved your essay in the anthology, Disability Visibility, where you question a friend’s Instagram caption that equates “mombods” with muscular strength. What cultural scripts do you want to tear up about mothering?
Jessica: As I’ve thought more about this, I am convinced that the shame I can feel as a disabled mother is largely bound up in the unsustainable cultural expectations about parenting in general. I worried that my physical limitations made me “less” of a mother. As I’ve reflected on those insecurities, though, I feel convinced that my disability makes me a better mom. Because of my disability, I’ve done the hard work of disentangling my worth from productivity and my happiness from novelty. I offer my child creativity, presence, and emotional attentiveness, all of which I value deeply.
Erin: In my own book, Someone Other Than a Mother, I latch onto the idea of mother as more verb than noun. But I’m also holding that in tension with your story. Like, I don’t want to put pressure on women to do more, when being is pretty brilliant, too.
Jessica: Right. I think it’s critical to acknowledge the sexism inherent in what we expect from mothers. Mothering does not have to mean doing it all; it can be whatever you want it to be. For me, it means being the fun parent.
Erin: Around our dining room table, we have a “fun” side and a “right” side of the table. If you can believe it, I have always sat on the “fun” side. Okay. Final Question: If you had to do a 30-second PSA debunking a common misconception about your life, what would you want others to know?
Jessica: I would ask that people — if they find themselves questioning if a disabled person can safely parent — to consider the context of that question. Is the obstacle to safety an issue of accessibility? If so, the focus should be on making houses and public spaces more accessible to all bodies. If the context is the unsustainable pressure on parents to carry impossible burdens, then we should focus on changing how we view parenthood. Judgments about the worthiness of disabled parents have real implications. It’s common for disabled parents to lose custody of their kids, often “preventatively.” In the disabled parenting groups that I am a part of, it’s a frequent topic of conversation. We are misdirecting our concern when we blame the disabled parent and not the society in which they are parenting.
Erin: Isn’t that the truth? So often we blame other people—our ourselves—for not measuring up to these parenting scripts when it’s the parenting scripts that are precisely the problem. Honored to be tearing these mother-effing scripts up with you.
P.S. Want to celebrate Jessica for doing her own work and sharing her own story? If so, you might consider joining her in supporting A New Way of Life, a nonprofit which serves formerly incarcerated people as they reenter society. Jessica also encourages people to find their local Domestic Violence shelter and donate monthly so that mothers leaving dangerous situations can have the emotional and practical support they need.