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Whangaripo mother Corinne King has two sons with muscular dystrophy. She reflects on the lockdown restrictions that those with disabilities must face every day …
Imagine after this lockdown is over, when life resumes some sort of normality, that you still couldn’t go where you wanted. Imagine the beach was closed to you and shops were also closed to you because you couldn’t gain access. Imagine that one step outside your local coffee shop is now what prohibits you from entering. Well, that’s what people with a disability face every day. Covid-19 changed everyone’s reality in a very short space of time but lives will return and, hopefully, we will all be forever changed.
Hopefully, now that people have had their freedoms taken away, it might open their eyes to the freedoms people with a disability have taken away from them every day. I feel like this has been a crash course on disability for the world. No, you can’t always have what you want. No, you can’t always do what you want to do. It’s a bit of a societal leveler a killer virus isn’t it? It won’t discriminate on economical or ethnic grounds. It’s happy with anyone – much like disability. It doesn’t have ‘a type’, it doesn’t happen to the people that can handle it. It happens to anyone.
It has been confusing to me how people are struggling so much with this, but I realised for a lot of people this is their first time. Not only is it the first time they’ve been told what they can and can’t do, but it’s the first time they are scared and anxious for the future. People with disabilities and their families, especially those who have a terminal diagnosis, are all too familiar with these thoughts. The future is a very frightening and uncertain place, so we look ahead as little as possible and don’t plan too far into the future. How do you plan for something that you just can’t predict anyway? When will the disease progress further? What will that look like? How will I cope? Who will look after a severely disabled adult, if I go before my child? This is often the worst fear of many parents of children with disabilities. But as you can see it’s a rabbit hole that you just can’t go down. It’s a spiral of thoughts I mostly try to keep at bay. I often say it’s given me the most wonderful gift; it’s given me the genuine ability to live for now – not thinking ahead, not planning the next big thing or a five-year plan. We don’t need to achieve career goals or financial goals to be happy, I think most of us know that really, but feel we still must be driven to be successful. Our children don’t need those things that’s for sure, they just need us.
So, enjoy this magical gift you have been given, time with your family, time to hang with your kids. Not filling with loads of activities and constant entertainment (don’t get me wrong, I’d be as lost without Roblox, as much as the next parent) but just hanging out with them, drifting from one thing to the next with no plans. Our kids will remember this time, not as something scary but as a time they got the undivided attention of a parent, aunty, grandparent or sibling.
We all face an uncertain future now, but I can tell you from someone who’s had their fair share of struggles (no more life lessons please, Universe!) you are stronger than you think and you have the ability to endure so much more than you imagined. This won’t destroy us, it will make us stronger. Be strong, be safe and think about others through this most monumental time. We are all in this together.
