Mom on Wheels: The Power of Purpose for a Parent With Paraplegia

Those were Marjorie Aunos's thoughts as her car hit black ice and spun out of control toward an oncoming truck. As she waited for paramedics to extricate her from the mangled wreck, unable to feel anything below her neck, she pictured her sixteen-month-old son. And decided to live.

So began the most challenging chapter in the life of this overachieving psychologist and single parent, whose life's work had been to advocate for parents with intellectual disabilities to help them keep custody of their children. Marjorie's spinal cord injury thrust her into a life as a newly-disabled parent, experiencing first hand the barriers and discrimination she'd witnessed for others.

She became one of those moms who wondered when child welfare officials would knock on the door with an apprehension order for her to give up her child.

In a remarkably short few months, determined not to let the accident take her professional identity, Marjorie returned to work-in her wheelchair. There, the strategies that had served her well before were ineffective. In fact, they were making things worse.

As a clinical psychologist, she told herself...

She should have been able to prevent her own depression, anxiety, and post-trauma.

She should have been able to reframe and rehabilitate herself.

She should have gone into post-traumatic growth and not post-traumatic disorder.

The should-haves fuelled deep shame and disappointment, which, in turn, increased her suffering.

But there were even bigger challenges.

Five days after the accident, she asked her parents to bring her son to the hospital. Thomas was frightened by the tubes and beeping machines. He refused to touch her, hug her, or sit beside her. Marjorie felt hurt that she couldn't be there for him and that he kept turning to his grandma for comfort.

For years she'd dreamed about becoming a mother-not just any mother, but a great mother. An active mother, a role model mother. Marjorie plunged further into helplessness and powerlessness, her concept of perfect motherhood shattered on that Quebec roadway. And the child she'd worked so hard for being taken care of by others in a way that she couldn't.

How can you be a good parent if you can't bend down to tie your child's shoes or scoop them into your arms for a hug or keep them safe at bath time without supervision? Does this make you a bad parent?

Between physical therapy rehabilitation, new day-to-day logistics, battles with an insurance company, ongoing physical pain and pain management, Marjorie had to start over as a parent too.

And she did. Giving her PTSD time to heal, Marjorie mastered co-parenting 101 with her parents, prioritizing self-care, and-something she'd never done before as an overachiever-learned how to ask for help because parenting is hard work.

Marjorie finally accepted about herself what she believed about her former clients, those parents with disabilities: she may roll differently to-and with-her son but she already knew how to be a good parent.