One of the first things I remember is being carried on my mom’s hip from our house to our neighbors’, where their high-school-aged son was playing music too loud. “You need to turn down the volume,” she said after he’d opened the door. My mom stood resolute in her command, my two-year-old body proof of her seriousness. Our neighbor turned down the music, and my mom and I went home.
Between their realization that my muscles weren’t working as my doctors thought muscles should, and the purchase of a powered wheelchair for me when I was five, my mother and father carried me everywhere: throughout the house, to the car, into the world. I lived at the height of adults, not table legs and knees, in a different world from the clumsy explorations of my upright toddler peers (although I still crawled, moving to pet our cat, Louie, or to reach for toys).
