Yantra Bertelli - My Baby Rides the Short Bus

This is the most important book I've read in years. Whether you are subject or ally,My Baby Rides the Short Bus will open youwith its truth, humanity, and poetry.Lucky you to have found it. Now stick it in your heart.

Ariel Gore, author, The Mother Trip: Hip Mama's Guide
to Staying Sane in the Chaos of Motherhood

Smart, diverse, inspiring. My Baby Rides the Short Bus reminds us of what we allhave in common and how much more work there still is to be done.

Vicki Forman, author, This Lovely Life:
A Memoir of Premature Motherhood

For the collections diverse and candid discussion of such topics as diagnosis,education, family, community support, respite and relearning to stand up in orderto be seen, heard, respected and believed, I hereby declare this book required readingfor outsider parents of all stripes, their allies, school psychologists, therapists,social workers and child advocates!

Jessica Mills, author, My Mother Wears Combat Boots:
A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us

If only that lady in the grocery store and all of those other so-called parentingexperts would read this book! These true-life tales by mothers and fathers raisingkids with "special needs" on the outer fringes of mainstream America are by turnsempowering, heartbreaking, inspiring, maddening, and even humorous. Readerswill be moved by the bold honesty of these voices, and by the fierce love anddetermination that rings throughout. This book is a vital addition to the publicdiscourse on disability.

Suzanne Kamata, editor, Love You to Pieces:
Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs

The contributors of this important and necessary anthology span a range ofdecades from a time when "defective babies" were institutionalized, to the nascentcivil rights movement, straight on to a new era of independent living. The familiessharing these stories live and often struggle with the consequences of illness,injury, genetic inheritance, or sometimes a perplexing and mysterious combinationof factors, insisting that the world recognize a basic fact: We are not scienceexperiments.

Disability is a uniquely humbling and equal experience, sometimes expected, oftenstriking without warning. These parents are honest about both the distressing andilluminating facts of their lives; the stories are caustic, exhilarating, fierce, funny,harrowing. Yet despite the intricate and often overwhelming challenges they face,these parents and children never succumb to maudlin stereotypes, because, as onecontributor learns, it isn't saintly to take care of someone you love.

Bee Lavender, author, Lessons in Taxidermy:
A Compendium of Safety and Danger

There are smaller groups within every subculture, just the way there are minirevolutions within every larger revolution; and often, as well, the realization thateveryone has not been included, after all. When any such group of people comestogether to seek answers and share questionsuniting personal voice and experiencesinto a larger chorusit creates a breakthrough that enriches all movementsfor social justice, as well as individual lives.

My Baby Rides the Short Bus is such a groundbreaking workwonderful,thought-provoking, and diverse in different abilities of the different children. Littlegems of life all buried in here, great tales. This book advances alternative parentingconsciousness raising; and we need many more (on different separate themeswithin the multitude of those disenfranchised) in order to strive towards a communitywhere no one will be left behind.

This is a collection of beautifully written stories, incredibly open and well articulated,complicated, and diverse: about human rights and human emotions. Aboutlove and difficulties; informative and supportive. Wise, non-conformist, andabsolutely punk rock!

China Martens, author, The Future Generation:
The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others

My Baby Rides the Short Bus:
The Unabashedly Human Experience
of Raising Kids with Disabilities

My Baby Rides the Short Bus:
The Unabashedly Human Experience
of Raising Kids with Disabilities

Edited by
Yantra Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman,
and Sarah Talbot

My Baby Rides the Short Bus:
The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities

Edited by Yantra Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman, and Sarah Talbot

ISBN: 978-1-60486-109-9
LCCN: 2009901395

Copyright 2009 Yantra Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman, and Sarah Talbot
This edition copyright 2009 PM Press
All Rights Reserved

PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org

Cover art by Liz Baillie
Index by Chris Dodge
Layout by Kersplebedeb

Printed in the USA, on recycled paper

A lmost ten years ago, three moms met on an online community bulletin board for alternative parents. We were activists, but it wasnt for a few more years that we discovered the most defining thing we would have in common: we are the parents of disabled kids. Our lives came together over the Internet and things changed. We all became parts of blended families as Yantra and Sarah became a couple, Jennifer remarried and eventually became a parent of two. Throughout, the diagnoses, the symptoms, and the services kept rolling in. We talked each other through advocating and strategizing, and we began to know a few things.

When friends from the online community Hipmama.com put together a conference in 2004, we offered a workshop on disabilities and parenting. In a windowless room, we chatted about what it felt like living with our kids while one of them obsessively watched the same movie for the 600th time and the other flipped pell-mell through a phonebook. Not a lot of other parents showed up, and most of them came only out of curiosity, not need. It didnt matter who showed up to the three of us, because for once we were subject, not object. We had pulled ourselves out of cautionary tales about things that can go wrong with babies, out of isolation, and pulled ourselves into the center of our own stories together.

We decided to put together a zine, and this book was born of our work.

Raising a child with a disability brings a whole new level of isolation to alternative parents, who do not fit into the mainstream through circumstance, identity, or choice, and who carefully consider the implications of our parenting. Disability forces us to reach back toward the mainstream while moving us irrevocably outside of it. We might have been planning to put our children in small, alternative schools before we knew they were disabled, and now, after the diagnosis, find ourselves fierce advocates of their inclusion in traditional classrooms. While we might have had home births planned, we may spend years in hospitals praying for the success of invasive medical procedures. While we might have fantasized about anarchist communes before our disabled babies entered our lives, we find ourselves lobbying the legislature for increases in funding to state bureaucracies. We, who had previously rejected the institutional structures of mainstream culture or found ourselves on the margins to begin with, discovered that we are clinging to the slim hope that they will save us after all.