I always knew I’d be a mother. Even before I was a pre-teen, I had it all planned out. I was going to graduate, meet a handsome Christian man, fall in love and get married by 21. Immediately afterward: babies. At least six. I had a list of names and personality traits; we would rise with the sun, and they would do their lessons, help me make food and run the farm. They never talked back, and I was always full of joy because this mama loved the Lord and ran a tight ship.

It would take me years to realize that not only was this not realistic, but I didn’t actually want it.

Although I did get married fairly young—at 24—I knew about adult things like money and housing and only having so many hands. I was prepared to be content with three children on a property maybe large enough for a dog. I had lots of time. 

My first pregnancy at the age of 26 ended with a blighted ovum that required a medical abortion. In an instant, everything I’d been told about God, family, bodies and political playgrounds started to fall apart. I wanted to never get out of bed again.

It would be more than a year before we were ready to try again. This time, the first 20 weeks were a dream come true. And then: a phone call. Something didn’t look right, and a close eye would need to be kept. 

For the next 18 weeks, I breathed and suffered and prayed. And five days before my 4th wedding anniversary, I delivered a little boy with Noonan syndrome named Harrison. We met each other officially in the NICU, and spent a month there getting ready for life on the outside. We would come back to the hospital multiple times a year. 

Despite Harrison’s struggles—or perhaps because of them—we felt that he could benefit from a sibling. So, just after his first birthday, we felt brave and ready and tried again. Almost immediately afterward, I carried and gave birth to a little girl with autism named Evangeline. At the same time, my uterus started growing a fibroid tumour.

Harrison was barely three years old when he had the first of six brain surgeries. His experimental chemotherapy started, and so did a global pandemic. I forgot about my own body, until I couldn’t anymore. After suffering chronic pain and fatigue for months, I had a near-complete hysterectomy followed by a blood clot on my lung that nearly took my life. My capacity for breath and movement never quite bounced back.

I became a mother in 2016—and then became a shell of myself in 2019. By the end of 2020, the mama who “loved the Lord and ran a tight ship” was gone.

I had been taught that I was born with a propensity for wickedness, just like everyone else, and any goodness I had was outsourced from someone else willing to do the hard work of breaking me, making me good. I was a wretch saved by grace; blind but now I see. (As though being blind is equivalent to wretchedness!) 

It was my personal responsibility to raise my children the same way. 

And then they were real flesh and blood people looking at me, asking me to learn about genetics and brain development through a lens that could not be prayed or punished away—just understood. 

Keeping them, the rest of my family, and myself alive and well was exhausting enough; saving their souls was no longer relevant. 

I began to see what a self-fulfilling prophecy it is to believe your child is inherently bad, to completely bypass trauma, science and survival skills as valid pieces of the puzzle that make up our actions. 

I began to have the audacity to believe that my disabled children—all children—had been born already good, and that a world hostile to their needs, emotions, and development was what needed to be changed. 

In This Here Flesh, New York Times bestselling author Cole Arthur Riley writes, “The sick, the elderly, the disabled, the neurodivergent, my sweet cousin on the autism spectrum — we tend to assign lesser social value to those whose ‘doing’ cannot be enslaved into a given output. We should look to them as sacred guides out of the bondage of productivity.” 

Many people are raising their children with this foundation now, whether their upbringing was tied to religion or not, whether they have disabled children or not. 

The current label for this parenting modality is fluid: 

responsive…gentle…conscious…respectful…attachment…each word conjures a different association. And while it may be new to some people, the concept itself is not new at all. It has existed since time immemorial. It is pre-colonial, it is Indigenous, it is the village that was burned to expand empires which valued children as heirs, soldiers and slaves. 

Any desire to raise our children in a non-violent way is simply an ancient call to return. To reclaim. To rebirth and to rebuild a community that no longer requires violence to feel secure. 

It sounds utopian, but in many ways, it is actually the bowels of hell. In my attempts to teach small beings in survival mode to not self-or-others-destruct, I realized that I could only recreate what had been modeled for me. As easy as it was to believe I would lay down my life for these babies without hesitation, it was just as easy to repeat the patterns of anger, neglect and fear buttressed by conditional love that my evangelical upbringing taught me I deserved.

Everything unhealed inside of me was destined to be triggered by my children. Even though I have more tools now, I’m not only doing the hard work of parenting, I’m doing the double shift of reparenting myself. 

The spectrum of colonized parenting seems to be complete permissiveness or violent rigidity. Because it’s easier. The common denominator is short term compliance. Being willing to stay firm but kind takes the patience that white supremacy and capitalism cannot afford. 

This spectrum, as we’ve seen in many public examples of violent and/or narcissistic adults, is certainly not sustainable. Boundaries, consent and saying no is still absolutely necessary for safety, growth and empathy. But because children’s brains aren’t developed enough yet to understand why they’re being limited, they’re going to have big feelings about it. 

My children’s brains, affected by tumours and neurodivergence, are even more impacted by unexpected change and overwhelming emotions. So now it’s my job to provide a space where they learn that they can navigate those changes and will survive those emotions.

If they hit, bite, scream, or kick, I do not retaliate no matter how much I feel like it. I refuse to become the bully. I remove myself as a boundary and try again a few minutes later.

If they break something, natural consequences come into play: when they’ve calmed down, they might help clean up the mess and figure out how they’re going to fix it. If they can’t, the broken item simply doesn’t get replaced. But their violence will not be met with violence, because that is a road with no stop sign. 

Even if we’re not talking yet, we’re communicating. If I lost my patience, yelled or overreacted, I apologize because not only does this not weaken my authority, it strengthens my child’s foundation to know that I also have feelings and that it’s possible to make amends.

It doesn’t always work. Some days, my body is filled with so much pain and fatigue that I give in to a demand they’ve made. I crawl into bed early because I just need to get out of Today.

But with enough consistency, I know that the neural pathways in their brain are being forged with as little pain and trauma associated as possible. I know that they are learning rest and repair from me. And I hope that because they know I cared about the small things, one day they will come to me with the big things. 

As much as I was destined to be slogging through my trauma from the moment I became a mother, I was also destined to heal myself and my family line. In the midst of parents, teachers and church leaders who were in the business of “tough” love, I had one unexpected example of decolonial parenting follow me through to adulthood: that scene in The Lion King (1994) after Mufasa saves Simba from the Shadowlands.

I remember watching as a child, fully believing I was about to see a cartoon lion physically, emotionally, verbally and spiritually punish his disobedient son. If he was going to be a good parent, that is. That’s what made sense to me. 

But nearly every person alive today knows what really happened. An impassioned speech, followed by an honest confession of fear, and affectionate repair – beneath the starry sky of their ancestors.

On those really hard days, I try to think of Mufasa and how he did the things I least expected. “You are more than what you have come. Remember who you are.”

I think of my own Yaqui-Pascua ancestors who are watching me trailblaze generational healing, watching me pave the way back to who they were before they were displaced and assimilated by Empire.

While certain hostilities have always been present, we are seeing an increase of violence towards people who are disabled, mentally ill and/or neurodivergent, and I believe the global pandemic has played a role in that, with these communities becoming the most unprotected. 

During 2020, when folks were equating their rights with going to restaurants, a Twitter user posted a thought provoking tweet that resonated with me. 

In a paper published for the University of Toronto called Disability as a Colonial Construct: The Missing Discourse of Culture in Conceptualizations of Disabled Indigenous Children, Nicole Ineese-Nash, MA, writes:

Many Indigenous languages of Turtle Island (North America) have no word describing the concept of disability. This may be due to the nature of these languages, which are largely verb- and context-based (Gross, 2016). Traditionally in Anishinaabe culture, people are named through ceremony to reflect the gifts that they carry or responsibilities they hold within community (Willmott, 2016). These names often reflect the capacities of individuals in relation to the spiritual realm (Wyatt, 2009). In this way, children learn from a young age their role within the community as described by what they can do, what their unique gift is, or what teachings they bring to the collective (Johnston, 2018). When describing a child, there is not often a discussion about what the child is lacking, or what they cannot do, because of the understanding that all children are gifts to the community (Greenwood, 2006).

Words like these give me hope even as I’m afraid for my children entering a world that doesn’t want to see them. Because I don’t know what will happen to them after I’m gone. 

In 2023 alone, Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) funding has expanded to include the mentally ill and disability communities, rather than providing resources that would increase our will to live. (But a vote on Bill C-22 might change that!). An autistic Indigenous boy was arrested at BC Children’s Hospital (where my autistic Indigenous son regularly receives care), and a Black autistic boy was physically struck by his family’s waiter at a Keg restaurant in Toronto. Many of the United States are trying to retain current laws that allow disabled children in schools to receive corporal punishment, and the public death of Jordan Neely (a Black, disabled, unhoused man) sent people worldwide to raise over 2 million dollars for his killer.  

And these are just the stories we know about. 

De-colonial people and parents will change this world if we let them. We are playing the long game, and the only ones who don’t want us to succeed are the ones who want to financially benefit from our trauma, stress and anger. 

But however we choose to raise children, in whatever role, we must acknowledge that we are planting seeds of a tree whose shade we may never sit under. Will the fruit be rotten, will the weeds choke everything around them? Will you water and prune and tend to these juicy little shoots tenderly?

 Our children and their children and their children, all the way up to the seventh generation, are seeking the obligation of your shelter.