Review: I Don't Do Disability and Other Lies I've Told Myself by Adelle Purdham

Review: I Don't Do Disability and Other Lies I've Told Myself by Adelle Purdham

My Quick Take: Less a memoir than a series of related essays on disability, motherhood and relationships, Purdham’s book was highly relatable as I sped through the pages.

Thanks to Dundern Press, River Street Writing and the author for a gifted copy for review.

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Initially, I assumed that Adelle Purdam’s first book, I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, would focus almost exclusively on disability. Purdham holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction as well as a Bachelor's degree in Education, and is a writer and educator. When her middle daughter was born with Down syndrome, Purdham had a new lens with which to see the world, and it has spurred her to become a disability advocate, both for her daughter, but also in the larger disability community. In I Don’t Do Disability, though, she begins with the birth of her children–with a focus on her second child–then uses this lens to explore other topics, including womanhood, parenthood, partnerhood and selfhood. Indeed, she has termed it “a memoir-in-essays,” and I think that’s accurate.

I, for one, couldn’t be happier. Not only was I able to learn about her joys and challenges of parenting her daughter who has Down syndrome, but I was also privy to the equal but different joys and challenges of parenting in general, and given a glimpse into Purdham’s inner work to evolve as a person. It was often starkly personal; I appreciated her putting her inner life on the page, in large part because I related to what she said very much.

The overarching theme I came away with was “moving towards connection”. In “How to Make a New Love,” she explores spousal love: the separation and the renewal. “When love struck, marriage was not an answer or a cure, it was the beginning of something new, a daily decision to love another person. Maybe loving another was allowing yourself and what was between you to erode away, be reshaped and remoulded with time, and to take a new form, over and over again.”

She writes much about the push and pull of family and parenting, and is particularly adept at touching that horribly uncomfortable place of cognitive dissonance that feels impossible to navigate when it is acute. At one point during the pandemic isolation, the family of five is in a lakeside cabin, and she and her husband find themselves “at a bitter standstill.” They fight, and Adele retreats behind the bathroom shower curtain, hands over her ears, in tears. “‘Just leave me alone. Leave me alone, leave me alone.’ Those are the only words I know.”

Later, after a particularly fraught hike with her three daughters and her dog, and she was able to put words to this conundrum:

“On the drive home, I turn the music up and think about contradictions in life: how we make our decisions hoping they will lead to happiness, but there is no recourse when they don’t. You can’t put the children back where they came from, or rehome the dog you’ve tamed for acting the way you’ve tamed him. And I don’t want the things I love to go away, either–that would be the worst idea. A true impossibility in my heart. I just don’t want everything to feel so damned hard all the time, or the confusion of contradictions to barrage my brain.”

My favourite essay was “The Mushroom,” where Purdham intersperses quotes from sources teaching about the interconnectedness of fungi and trees, and alternates these passages with everyday episodes from a daytime walk and bedtime routine with her daughters. Arriving home one afternoon, she spies a beautiful mushroom that her dog promptly steps on, destroying it. “Now why would you go and grow a flimsy neck like that when you have such a big head?” she asks the mushroom, dismayed by its fragility. Later, during bedtime stories, she notices how fragile her daughter with Down syndrome appears, "something about her fragility then, her dependence on me as her mother, reminds me of the mushroom–the one we killed. Is it that having Down syndrome sets her apart, like that lone, spindly stalk? Set apart and at risk. Set apart and at risk of being kicked, toppled over.”

Here, then, is the crisis of her self-exploration that struck me to the core, a revelatory and honest reflection that jabs at the intersection of parental love and parental anxiety:

“At my worst, I blame my children for the way they are made, for the way my husband and I have made them, and the way they have become. Bad things wouldn’t have happened to you…if you had slowed down instead of running, you wouldn’t have tripped and scraped your knee; if you had washed your hands, you wouldn’t have gotten sick from handling toads; if you’d eaten your vegetables and brushed your teeth, you wouldn’t have gotten that cavity; if you’d just been kind, you wouldn’t have gotten into that fight with your sister.

Bad things wouldn’t have happened to you if you had never been born with Down syndrome. Sometimes I feel this way. At my worst. Sometimes. But all these comments I might make in distress–now why would you go and grow a flimsy neck like that when you have such a big head?–have more to do with my issues, my neurosis as a mother, then they ever have to do with the children’s actions and behaviours themselves. They certainly didn’t want to fall and scrape their knee; the certainly didn’t intend the damage, but when the damage is done, I fault them because it is my job to keep them safe, and in a self-aggrandizing way, they have prevented me from doing so by virtue of their being. But I brought them here, I called their spirits forth, and so I am responsible for them, and I do not like to fail. I do not like to see my children injured and so I…injure them further? I’m not proud of my ability to chastise the broken, the already downtrodden; to embody the weakness I despise.”

Here, though, is the second crux of Purdham’s soul-searching, and what makes this an empathetic and compassionate journey: Later, after the bedtime story is over and the chaos of the day is done, and she lays her middle daughter asleep on the bed, “she is as peaceful as peaceful can be, and I am happy to have given her what she needs. She is tiny, no big head at all. And while she is flimsy at first glance, her slumbering spirit is strong. She is alive and worthy–as worthy as I’ll ever be as a mother.”

Certainly, there were essays that hit closer than others for me, and, as I said off the top, the book contained more material than the title hinted at. That could be important to know before opening the pages, but Purdham’s writing is excellent and engaging, and she gave me so much to ponder.

The recognition and acknowledgement of our emotional life-in-knots as parents; or as partners in a marriage during challenging times; or as women who struggle with taking time for career is what Purdham’s book does so well. And at the end of the self-examination is the issue of choice. For her, “freedom and space to oneself is a gift, but…so is connection, family, togetherness–being tamed. So is the option to RETURN.” In the essays, Purdham chooses to return. Connection isn’t a default; rather it is a choice that we make time and again.