A semblance of normality: An ex- lawyer/ stay at home mum/disabled mums view

I spent years trying to lose weight. Years. The year before I got married, I even went to a Rosemary Conley fitness club. I lost half a stone and announced to my fiance that this would be the skinniest I’d ever look. “Well that was false advertising,” he stated a few years later. Anyway. We’re still married. When I had my brain haemorrhage, I went down 3 stone. Oh, the irony. Every cloud and all that… Although I was the slimmest I’d ever been, I wouldn’t recommend it. I was incredibly, possibly unhealthily, thin. And the fact was, it happened, because after my brain bleed I was randomly sick most days for over a year. After a year, I was lucky (I jest) enough to be randomly sick every other day or so. Then, slowly I progressed to weekly random vomiting, onto monthly, every few months and finally the random puke stopped happening at all. Nausea and vomiting can be a hideous - yet common - side effect of the kind of brain haemorrhage and stroke I suffered. For over two years my best fri...

  Missing Out: From FOMO to JOMO -------------------EDIT ------------------------------------ Since posting this I’ve really started to feel the ‘missing out’ feeling again (not having had this feeling for 18 months - as nobody could do anything. This, lack of the 'missing out' feeling was an unanticipated positive of lockdown for me. However, I am only now appreciating it as it is back with vengeance ) A good example is next week's golf competition which I can't go too.... even with the golf I'm sad... but it would be horrible like this so I am hoping I can find the Joy Of Missing Out! I'm partly reposting this to help me feel more JOMO! ------------------------------------------------------------------ Brain injury is cruel, it takes years from you and you can't ever get them back. Everyone has had a taste of my restricted life recently and has had the pause button pressed on their lives. It’s rubbish! FOMO is the Fear Of Missing Out. It’s been described ...

  My daughter (11) wrote the following speech for her class at school and her teacher kindly sent it to me. I think what I have been whinging about (a lot obviously ) has gone in: 'Hi my name is x and I am here to talk to you about disability discrimination. The reason I am going to talk about this subject is I am very passionate people know what disability discrimination is. All over the world people are building new restaurants and hotels, but these new amazing buildings are forgetting about laws that were put in place to help the disabled access for these buildings. These buildings are still allowed to open due to them finding ways around the law. I am going to tell you a short story about something that happened to my mum. One morning my mum was going out and so my mum called a taxi. When she was saying goodbye to her PA/helper the taxi driver would only speak to my mum's PA, completely ignoring her presence. After a while my Mum had, had enough. She told the driver she ...

I had a really good talk recently with my 10 year old about where babies come from. School and their friends had obviously given them some information, but I thought I should have a talk too. My talk went well. It went really well. So well, in fact, that I sent my husband this message: “I just had an interesting 'sex' talk with X. It was actually fine. X told me Y had said that people have sex. So I asked what that was . X told me it involved boy and girl’s private parts. I said it did. X kept sticking her tongue out and saying yuck - lol'” Anyway, phew. Hard work over about how babies get in and out and how surprisingly easy it was! It turns out it was easy - easily forgotten! I obviously did a terrible job because a few months later we were talking. I was confused because I knew we’d had 'that' talk. So I pushed. And it soon became obvious that X couldn't even remember ever having that conversation! Talk about annoying. I’d lost sleep over having 'that...

I’ve tried really hard not to be too stroppy about this one. However, one of the hardest things about being disabled is the experience, time and again, of companies that just don’t think enough - or well enough - or creatively enough - about disabled access. Sure, there are laws, but in my experience, so many companies get away with doing the minimum, or just paying lip service. As far as surfaces go: I absolutely hate gravel, cobblestones and steps. If you are a company and you take nothing else away from this blog about disabled access, please know this: as a person using a walker/wheelchair, non-smooth and unlevel surfaces are my nemesis. Time and time again, I come across access situations where I wouldn't have a problem if a disabled person had just tested the access or been asked their opinion. Even if a non-disabled person just sat in a wheelchair (happy to lend you mine!) and tested various access paths themselves, it would become obvious how bad things can be and perhaps ...