“Ain’t No Normal” was written for an online event/exploration in January, 2023 called What are We? as part of the Brave New Works festival. A group of friends came together to explore how disability and impairment are entangled with the construction of the ideal ‘human’. Learn more about the ongoing explorations and inquiries in the crip-queer landscape here. What follows is an edited version of the original piece.

My dear friends, I hate to break it to y’all but there ain’t no such thing as “normal.” If I turn the kaleidoscope of perception and begin relating with myself, other people and the other-than-human through this belief-lens, I destabilize one of the basic fundaments of ableism. I undermine its very logic: that there is some ideal human form that we should all be trying to squeeze ourselves into; that I have to smooth out and cover up my strange, rough edges or discombobulated mind. This also reminds me that there ain’t no “normal” way that I gotta talk about ableism or disability.

I once wrote:

…from my overly-able-bodied point of view… from this body that can do so much but cannot seem to sustain another life… that is constantly ‘leaking babies’ (as they say in the Hmong culture)… I have become curious about all this death inside me. Not at ease. Each fetus… each child… each life is a crack, an incomprehensible site of descent…”

I’ve spent a lot of time comparing myself to what I considered to be “normal moms.” Moms of living babies, living kids that grow up into living adults. I’ve spent a good part of the past five years being angry and jealous, yes… and feeling entitled, resentful and spited. But, through this dance with my fellow humans and the other-than-human (oftentimes in the form of my dead babies) and within the landscape of the question “…how does disability productively color our lives?” I welcome all of these experiences more now and I notice more my tendency to self-blame and judge these feelings as negative or ugly. I see how the systemic hegemony of “normality,” combined with an impulse to compare so ubiquitous it is nearly unperceivable, has set me up to respond in just this way.

In my heart of hearts, I am simply longing for a sense of solidarity – of being “in it” with others. For me, that “it” is being the parent of dead children. And for others it could be the loss of a limb, neurodivergence, sightlessness, chronic illness, debilitating pain… and any sin fin number of other life experiences. And yet, so often I do not have the experience of solidarity because of shame (yay!) and taboos. The myth of normality has forced many of us – us moms of dead babies – into hiding. Feeling like a failure at something that so many other people seem to do without a second thought pushes me back further into the shadows. Other people just think that what happened to us is pure tragedy or the source of life-long trauma. Most do not want to hear about it. Many cannot bear it… because it is something that “is not supposed to happen.”

Yet babies die by the thousands every day all over this planet in different ways. And there’s no such thing as normal. So I’m lathering myself up with some shame repellent and dropping my bag of entitlement… the one that’s full of a bunch of stanky modern beliefs about how I deserve to be a mother to a living child. I got the experience in this lifetime that I got. It’s not better or worse, or more normal or less than anyone else’s. When I remove the veils of normality and comparison, I accept my experience for what it is… what we are.