from "My Left Foot" by Christy Brown (1932 - 1981)

Christy Brown was an Irish writer and painter
who had cerebral palsy
and was able to write or type
only with the toes of one foot.

I was a little over a year old
when they began to take me to hospitals and clinics,
convinced that
there was something definitely wrong with me,
something which they could not understand or name,
but which was very real and disturbing.

Almost every doctor who saw and examined me,
labelled me a very interesting
but also a hopeless case.
Many told my mother very gently
that I was mentally defective and would remain so.

The doctors were so very sure of themselves
that my mother's faith in me
seemed almost an impertinence.
They assured her that nothing could be done for me.

She refused to accept this truth,
the inevitable truth as it then seemed,
that I was beyond cure, beyond saving,
even beyond hope.
She had nothing in the world to go by,
not a scrap of evidence to support her conviction that,
though my body was crippled, my mind was not.

No matter how dull and incapable
I might grow up to be,
she was determined to treat me
on the same plane as the others,
and not as the 'queer one' in the back room
who was never spoken of
when there were visitors present.

That was a momentous decision
as far as my future life was concerned.
It meant that
I would always have my mother on my side
to help me fight the battles that were to come,
and to inspire me with new strength
when I was almost beaten.
But it wasn't easy for her because now
the relatives and friends had decided otherwise.

They contended that
I should be taken kindly, sympathetically,
but not seriously.
That would be a mistake.
They told her
'For your own sake
don't look to this boy
as you would to the others;
it would only break your heart in the end.'

Luckily for me,
mother and father held out against the lot of them.
But mother wasn't content
just to say that I was not an idiot,
she set out to prove it,
not because of any rigid sense of duty,
but out of love.
That is why she was so successful.