I’ve been keeping a secret from you. Those of you who follow this blog, and know me and my family know the secret. Following the travel adventures on these digital pages, you wouldn’t know one of its members has disabilities that encompass physical, social, and intellectual capacities. You’d make all kinds of assumptions about my “normal” family. Understandable. But social media is skewed and unreal. Here’s another secret: normal doesn’t exist. It’s a made-up construct to describe a statistical average. Normal means different. The idea of normal can only exist as an amalgamation of difference. “Normal” is how one imagines a whole bunch of difference. So my normal family has two cis-gendered parents, (me and my husband of 25 years), our eldest, a non-binary, brilliant good human (24), and our youngest, (22) with obvious cognitive and physical differences.  Here’s another surprise…but not to the approx. 20% of the North American population living the reality…the divorce rate amongst couples with a disabled child is between 80-87% depending on what article/study you’re looking at.

It’s a reality. Parenting difference is hard. Really hard. I’m not saying this to endear myself to you.  Travelling has been an outlet for our family. It was an important statement about who we are and the values we sought to instill in our children. The world isn’t made of up privileged white people. The world is diverse, multicoloured, a bit whacky, and sometimes scary. We deliberately took our kids to less-travelled places whenever possible. I wanted them to learn that even if things didn’t go as planned, the world’s still a safe place. It’s a place to cherish.

So yeah, we travelled. This blog started when we left town for three months (blogs from 2012) with our ten and twelve-year-olds and it was a way to stay in touch with our friends. They knew our situation, so there was no pretending. But as time has gone on, these blogs have felt inauthentic.  That’s going to change. I hope you stay…there will be some talk of travel. But I understand if messy life isn’t your jam. Thanks for reading and if you need to go, I wish you the best. I do. This is a photo of us in Morocco one year ago. Thanks to @flytographer for capturing our beautiful memories.