Mother's Day
5/6/10 11:38 AM
Thank You, Mama Mom’s and my dance of love and defiance began in the womb with my first kick. My favorite place to put my foot was right under her ribcage. She would make several attempts to push my foot back down, but it was to no avail. I would just kick right back with even more force than before. While I sit here writing my last blog for this semester, I think about how my mom always told that story with such a smile on her face. I know that Mother’s Day is coming up, and as I’ve talked about in previous entries, my mom died nearly six years ago. I believe that a very...Inspiration
4/23/10 12:06 PM
Everyone has that one thing in life that has changed them-- the thing that drives them to improve their quality of life so much they want to be able to give it to others like themselves. For Mike Cottingham, that one thing was something he was lucky enough to discover at an early age. It turned out to be sports during high school. For most young men, this is a normal rite of passage. Mike was no different except he rolled through his rite in a wheelchair. In 1979, Mike was born perfectly healthy. He, however, was premature and swallowed a great deal of amniotic fluid. The doctors wanted to put him on a feeding system so he could breathe and eat...Trapped
4/16/10 12:05 PM
Sometimes when I sit down to begin writing I wonder if maybe my readers get tired of me talking about my “small victories” of going to the grocery store by myself. Or the story of how I drove my scooter/power chair downtown for a slice of pizza. One of the things that was suggested to me, however, when I first began writing these blogs from the viewpoint of a disabled person was to make people aware of what someone like myself experiences in everyday existence. I know one thing that I have not really talked about is what it is like to grow up feeling like an able-bodied person trapped in a disabled person's body. I say “trapped” because that is how I feel ...Legs
4/7/10 3:15 PM
I don’t remember the first steps I took. Nor do I remember having people question whether I would be able to take them at all. Having been born with something known as aglossia adactylia syndrome, however, my left leg was just one of my extremities without which I was born. Even though I was lacking a left leg below the knee and all but one finger, there were no delays in my developments. I started pulling up on furniture around the same age as most children do when they start exhibiting signs they are about to become mobile. At this point, my parents began looking into having me fitted with a prosthetic leg. ...Mothers
4/1/10 11:57 AM
The other day I was on the phone with my friend, Desiree, talking about our moms. Both of our moms have died. Desiree’s mother died in December. Mine has been gone nearly six years now. I look at the way she has handled the death of her mom, or the way my brothers have handled the death of our mom. Sometimes I feel like if they handed out grades for how well someone dealt with the death of a parent I would have gotten an ‘F.’ I said to Desiree, “You’re so much better at losing your mom than I have been. I pretty much just shut down and gave up.” She said, “Yeah, but I could tie my own shoes when my mom died.” This was actually something we were...
