The LIFE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF DISABILITY

JUNE 22, 2026

About ten years ago, maybe a little more, I stepped away from social media.

Back then, for me, it was mostly Facebook.

I did not make a dramatic announcement.

No goodbye post.

No soft-focus sunset.

No quote about choosing peace.

I just stopped being there.

At the time, it felt like the only thing I could control.

Every time I opened Facebook, it felt like looking through glass.

Close enough to see the other side clearly.

Far enough away to know we were not living there.

I saw families I knew posting about summer camps, school milestones, birthday parties, sports, friendships, and ordinary childhood things.

The posts were not wrong.

People were allowed to be happy.

People were allowed to celebrate their children.

I knew that then, and I know that now.

But I was living inside a completely different version of motherhood.

While other families were posting about summer camps, I was fighting with the school to keep my youngest enrolled.

They were trying to say he was too unsafe to attend.

At the same time, they were saying he was not entitled to the supports that would help make school safe.

That contradiction still sits in my body.

Too unsafe to include.

Not supported enough to be safe.

Too much need.

Not enough entitlement.

We were not fighting for extras.

We were fighting for safety.

I was also grieving.

That part is hard to explain unless you have lived near it.

Because my child was here.

He was alive.

He was loved.

He was mine.

But I was grieving.

I was not grieving him.

I was grieving the childhood he was being denied in front of me.

The ease.

The friendships.

The invitations.

The school years with a normal amount of worry.

The future I had imagined before I understood how different our road would be.

Those feelings are real.

They are not pretty.

They are not always easy to say out loud.

But they are real.

And they take time to resolve.

I do not expect people outside of families who live this to understand the depth of it.

Some things cannot be understood from the sidewalk.

You have to live inside the house.

There are parts of my life people may think they know.

The leadership.

The bodybuilding.

The discipline.

The stage.

The titles.

Those parts are real.

But they are not the whole story.

There were years of struggle and heartbreak that most people never saw.

Years where I was not standing on a stage.

I was sitting in school meetings.

Writing emails.

Answering calls from the school.

Trying to keep my child included.

Trying to keep him safe.

Trying to protect him from bias and judgement for circumstances he did not choose.

That is a different kind of strength.

Not the kind people clap for.

Not the kind that gets a trophy.

The kind where you go home and cry in your car before walking back into the house because your child still needs dinner, regulation, softness, and a mother who can keep showing up.

In those primary years, my son’s biggest goals were painfully ordinary.

He wanted a friend.

He wanted to be invited to class parties.

That was it.

He was not asking for anything grand.

He wanted a friend.

He wanted an invitation.

He wanted to belong in the room other children seemed to enter without needing a case file.

One day after school, I sat at the playground while he had some much-needed free play.

The kind of play his body needed after holding himself together through a school day that was never really built with him in mind.

I was sitting close by.

Close enough to hear.

Apparently invisible enough to be forgotten.

Two parents started talking about the challenges my child was experiencing in the classroom.

In real time.

Casually.

As if they were discussing parking.

Or the weather.

Or something mildly inconvenient.

They had no idea who I was.

They had no idea I was his mother.

They were speaking about a child.

My child.

With no regard for disability.

No regard for context.

No regard for the fact that children are not gossip.

I sat there and listened.

And it broke my heart.

Not because I thought everyone had to understand everything.

But because he was already trying so hard to belong.

He wanted a friend.

He wanted to be invited.

And here were adults turning his struggle into playground conversation.

So I got up.

I walked over.

I introduced myself.

And I pointed out that they were discussing a child.

My child.

A child whose hardest moments were not available for their thoughtless commentary.

I do not remember every word I said.

I remember the feeling.

The heat in my chest.

The heartbreak.

The steadiness that arrives when your child is being spoken about like a problem and you understand, without needing to think about it, that you have to become the wall.

That playground conversation was not just one painful moment.

It was part of something larger.

Because those casual parent conversations do not stay with the parents.

They filter down.

Children hear tone before they understand complexity.

They hear who is treated as a problem.

Who is scary.

Who is difficult.

Who is too much.

Who does not belong.

And those words find their way into classrooms, hallways, playgrounds, birthday parties, and lunch tables.

My child was called dumb.

Stupid.

Scary.

Not because children are born with that language.

They learn it.

Children learn what the adults around them make normal.

They learn kindness that way.

They learn exclusion that way too.

Bias does not appear from nowhere.

It is taught in glances.

Comments.

Sighs.

Gossip.

Avoidance.

The way adults speak about children when they think the child, or the child’s mother, is not listening.

We like to tell ourselves children are innocent.

And they are.

But they are also listening.

They are learning who deserves patience and who deserves suspicion.

They are learning whether a struggling child is still a child.

That is why those conversations matter.

That is why the tone set inside families matters.

As a society, we learn kindness or hate inside our own family systems first.

I know both all too intimately.

I know what it feels like to watch a child carry labels placed on him by people who never had to understand his nervous system, his disability, his fear, his effort, or the amount of work it took for him to simply make it through a day.

And I know what it costs a mother to witness that.

To watch your child want a friend while the adults around him quietly teach other children to be afraid of him.

That is a particular kind of heartbreak.

It does not announce itself.

It just sits beside you.

In the car.

At the playground.

In the school hallway.

At night, when the house finally gets quiet and your body realizes how much you held in.

That is the part people do not see.

They may see the behaviour.

They may hear the story.

They may notice the disruption.

They may have opinions.

People are never short on opinions.

But they do not always see the child underneath.

They do not see the loneliness of being his mother in those rooms.

They do not see the way your body reacts every time the school number appears on your phone.

They do not see the grief of watching your child want something so simple and knowing the world keeps making it hard.

So yes, I stepped away from social media.

Not because I hated anyone else’s happiness.

Not because I could not be happy for other families.

Not because their children’s milestones were wrong.

I stepped away because I could not keep pressing my face against the glass of a life that looked easier, simpler, more included, more possible.

I stepped away because I was already carrying enough.

I needed quiet.

I needed less exposure.

I needed to stop watching ordinary childhood unfold on a screen while I was trying to convince people my child still had a right to one.

I only recently activated that account again.

That feels strange to write.

A small sentence holding a decade.

I am not the same woman who left.

I do not think grief resolves because everything becomes easy.

I think some grief changes shape because you stop fighting with reality.

You stop trying to make your life match the version you thought you were getting.

You stop measuring your child against a road that was never built for him.

You begin to understand that love can exist beside grief.

Pride can exist beside exhaustion.

Acceptance can exist beside rage.

And a mother can be deeply grateful for her child while still telling the truth about how lonely parts of that journey have been.

I am not writing this because I want pity.

I do not want pity for my child.

I do not want pity for me.

Pity has never made a school safer.

Pity has never made a child more included.

Pity has never taught another parent to be careful with their words.

I am writing this now because I am finally in a place where I can.

With enough distance to tell the truth.

With enough tenderness to protect what is sacred.

And with enough anger left to know the truth still matters.

I am writing from a parent’s perspective because there are parts of this journey people do not see unless someone says them out loud.

The school meetings.

The quiet grief.

The social isolation.

The way casual adult conversations become children’s cruelty.

The way bias travels through families before it ever reaches a classroom.

The way a child can be judged for circumstances he did not choose.

The way a mother can look strong in every public room and still be breaking in private over whether her child will have one friend.

This is not pity.

This is awareness.

This is what it looked like from our side of the glass.