I have just begun to read a book whose very existence thrilled me. We’ve Got This, edited by Eliza Hull, an anthology of essays written by disabled parents.

I should not have to be as thrilled by this as I am by the way. It shouldn’t still be novel, I should not still be feeling like the only disabled parent out there. And yet, here we are, so thank you to Eliza and all her contemporaries for reminding me I am not.

I am not even a third of the way through the book and am already utterly convinced it should be compulsary reading for people of all abilities considering parenting. After all, as one essay reminds me, not everyone is born disabled. Sometimes, body and circumstance intervene to alter everything about the life you thought you knew.

I plan to buy a copy for my daughters to refer to. I’ve already asked my husband to read it too. It feels like sitting in a roomful of friends, of my equals. When someone mentions the stares, the physical pain, keeping pathways clear of toys, the genius of the Tommee Tippee Prep Machine for making baby bottles, I am here, nodding along like an obedient dog. The mother I am feels heard, seen.

The one idea I have always struggled with is disability pride. A lot of Hull’s contributors talk of being a proud disabled person. I admire this, I can respect it, but I cannot say I can share in it, rightly or wrongly.

But I am so struck by the entire text. The number of times expectant parents have been told to screen for disabilities as if their children need fixing before they are even born. (Full disclosure: I did screen my children in utero, because I am the mother and I chose to, particularly because screening isn’t possible for my disability, so I wanted to be assured of what I could. I certainly did not screen because any so called professional recommended it.)

Contributors often mention how “my body/disability has not disabled me. Society has disabled me.”

I thought this was a big sweeping statement, truly I did. Disabled my whole life and still that naive, to my shame. This being the same week I had to call Kev and tell him I might be reduced to crawling up the front stairs into our children’s Victorian-era school building because they had blocked off the planters I used to lurch for to hoist myself up – because the building’s listed status I believe, negates the need to improve access. I plan to challenge this with the administration soon because, as a friend pointed out to me “I have the right to parent with dignity. This is not dignified.”

But how true it proved to be. Disability is a challenge, because society closes its eyes to that very notion.

Hello world, I do not exist to make you uncomfortable. I am only me. I really don’t want to crawl up stairs to come and be with my daughter for her school-parent afternoon.

My girls are very accepting of all my differences because they have always known them and they simply are what they are.

One parent in Hull’s volume declared so simply: “Disability is unremarkable. I hope my kid will simply be able to say “So what”?”

I felt like I’d had a blow to the head. That sentence is me. I didn’t know it of course, otherwise it wouldn’t have been so dizzying. But all I wanted in becoming a disabled parent was normalising, to not feel so at odds with society for every choice I made that for others was just expected and ordinary.

My daughters are my greatest example of being normalised. When we are together, we each only have to be ourselves, accepted.

Disability is unremarkable. Disability is a moment’s injury, with a reach and ripples across a lifetime. It is not tangible, but an effect. It is omnipresent. But the person that grows around the injury, be it with pride or with grief and confusion spends every damn day of their life trying to live, to be seen and accepted. Some are exceptionally good at this, charging at the world. Some need help to find their way. Arguably, we are all a mix of the two.

But I think that disabled people, by and large, get to grips with their lot pretty well. A twisted limb or incapacity here becomes as common place to us as our hair colour or height. It is just part of who we are and how we do. This is why I rail against being an inspiration as a disabled person. I’m not doing anything remarkable. I’m just doing precisely what able bodied people do, just in the ways that I have learnt. And most of the time, I’m fine with that. But then you can’t lunge at planters in lieu of sturdy banisters anymore and you get quite fed up of difference, however unremarkable it is. Because if it is unremarkable, then surely in the 21st Century it needn’t be commented on anymore and we can all just be equal, walking safely up the stairs?

Sigh. I know. But my dignity will not be the casualty to the ignorance of society anymore. I am here, I exist. As such, I deserve to be as normal and unremarkable as I choose. Just with some bloody dignity.