I’m 54, and I’ve been a single mom for so long that sometimes I forget there was ever supposed to be a “before.”
Before the wheelchair. Before the sudden, clean line my life split into—everything I could do, and everything I had to learn how to do differently.
Nearly twenty years ago, an accident left me paralyzed from the waist down. One day I was rushing through a grocery store with a five-year-old tugging my sleeve for cereal shaped like dinosaurs. The next, I was staring at a ceiling tile in a rehab facility, trying to understand how a body could still be mine but no longer obey me.
People always assume the hardest part is the pain. It isn’t.
It’s the shrinking.
It’s how the world becomes a series of measurements: doorways, curb cuts, steps, bathrooms you can’t fit into. It’s the way strangers talk over your head like you’re invisible. It’s the way you learn to smile while someone says, “Oh, you’re so inspiring,” because you don’t know what else to do.
But in those early years, I had Liam.
And Liam—sweet, stubborn, hilarious little Liam—made it feel like we were still a whole world.
He was five when I came home in the chair. I worried he’d be scared of me. I worried he’d look at me like I was broken and never stop seeing it.
Instead, he marched up to my wheelchair, placed both hands on the armrests like he was inspecting a spaceship, and said, “Okay. So this is your new car.”
I laughed so hard I cried.
From then on, we became a team.
He brought me juice boxes and proudly called them “emergency supplies.” He held the door open with all the seriousness of a tiny bodyguard. When I struggled transferring from chair to bed, he would set his little hand on my wrist like he could lend me strength.
Some nights, when my arms ached from pushing myself all day, he would climb behind my chair and push me through our narrow hallway, huffing like a dramatic movie hero.
“We got you, Mom,” he’d say. “We always got you.”
