A Veterinarian of Lines

T

here’s a silver-haired cat lady in my mirror, a disabled woman turning a snarky 70 years old.
The distance between her and my abled, auburn-curled girlhood is all but untraversable.
Especially on my mobility scooter. But I shall try—needs must, as my grandmother often said.
But please don’t expect galloping argumentation corralled into elegant paragraphing.
These days, my old, grey brain just ain’t what it used to be. I think only in one-liners.
Thanks to my OCD, which grows ever more compulsively controlling as I age,
An increasingly limited amount of spoons—most spent fighting pain—
And a Long-COVID brain fog replicating the shifting mists of Avalon,
When I can write at all, single lines are both my process and my cripped form and content.
Each ends in sharp, single points, like newborn finger bones.
In this essay, I’ll do my best to assist in the birth of multiply intersecting lines from A to B:
1. Adoption to Bastardy
2. Ableism to Bullying
3. Accountability to Belonging
For clarity and a delineated precision of point-making, I’ll share each line discreetly ...
If this helps you draw your own lines—uncrossable, circumnavigating, or uniting—welcome.


Adoption------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------>

My mother was a true forced fit: an odious woman with a melodious singing voice.
Born in 1920, named Marguerite but reduced to Peggy, she presented as a raven-haired,
Snow White beauty with dimples and a warm, chocolate contralto,
Evoking Judy Garland, Mama Cass, and Karen Carpenter—all haunted, all dead.
But at least they chose to sing. Song escaped Peggy’s clenched throat only in snatches.
Music wrenched free unexpectedly, non-consensually, born against her will.
When she failed to keep her legs clamped primly shut and her tongue stapled still,
A lyric of her 1940s youth—a snippet of wartime love song—soared into the kitchen.
Channeled Vera Lynn sending hopeful bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.
Trilled like all three Andrews Sisters loving on their Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.
Enticed a new lover to walk on by, then wait on the corner. I told myself her song never
Enchanted me. I rolled teenage eyes, certain her one-line oldies couldn’t touch my
John, Paul, George, or Ringo, convinced her music made her an inscrutable dinosaur.
Not even my beloved Encyclopedia Britannica could excavate the rest of her buried lyrics.
But here’s the point I couldn’t see at 15: my mother was the smartest, most feral and furtive
Species of dinosaur: a sickle-clawed velociraptor who hunts relentlessly, slashing and kicking its prey.
So it cut like Mack the Knife and felt just like home, exactly what I deserved when the cute boy I loved
Wouldn’t touch me; when he told me to walk on by and keep going.
Because my mother eviscerated joy the way she dispatched spiders—with gusto,
With more force than necessary. Slamming a frying pan to the wall. Or me to the floor. Or both.
We both knew why. When Peggy glimpsed the life she could have—should have—had as Marguerite,
Joy roiled like a boil; its painful onset required immediate lancing.
When misery rearrested her, when both of us accepted we lived in the same house but were not
The same species, that jail was safer, for both of us. Adopted at three, when my mother looked at me,
She saw only the disabled little doggie in the window of Children’s Aid—
The mongrel runt the lovely Marguerite would have walked right on by.
Peggy’s lesser life was my fault. This little, limping ward of the state sentenced her warden.
Spackled with another woman’s blood, my freckled, bastard face indicted her.
My red hair condemned us both—an incessant reminder that
Her red blood once beat hopefully in seven, raven-haired babies.
Perfect babies. Who never sang one note. Dead babies, who were my mother’s real daughters.


<-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bastardy

Let’s begin where all adopted people begin: in theft weaponized by the colonial Canadian state.
Theft of love, care, home, family, history, language, heritage, culture, community, and future.
Adoption draws racist and classist lines to cut racialized and working-class families apart.
In the vile Sixties Scoop, seizure of Indigenous babies and every genocidal day since.
But wait, there’s more! Adoption is also a money-making, centuries long, patriarchal scam.
A joint wet dream of misogyny and capitalism that spawned the global othering called bastardy.
Such a fruitful, let’s-pluck-the-fruit-of-men’s-loins gaslighting, where greedy men get to put their
Pleasure first. Guilt free, get to abandon and disinherit their own babies before birth.
Evade all financial and emotional responsibility. Tell “fallen” women fecundity is their own nasty fault.
Condemn “illegitimate” babies with a life-sentence slur so vile, it must be spat as profanity:
“You dirty bastard!” weaponizing male privilege, male courts, religions, and governments.
Draw self-serving, uncrossable lines. Uplift the marriage-born as immutably, incontestably superior.
Shame baseborn bastards as less than human, inherently inferior for life. It’s only natural.
“Boys will be boys,” they shrug. Men will be boys who will wink and demand their right to stay boys.
Of course, all pleasure seeking, seed-spewing, bully boys always deserve to get off scot free.

- The Snarky Socialist-Feminist Encyclopedia I Longed For As A Bastard Child


Ableism--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

A dear friend smiled. “You’re an accessibility advocate because you’re an optimist.”
For seven decades, this old lady has been called many things, but optimist isn’t one of them.
She explained: “Abandoned by both your mothers—you know inclusion is love.
You honestly believe that when you tell abled people that disabled people are 23 percent
Of the population, but only an underrepresented three percent of Canadian writers, they’ll listen.
You optimistically believe once they see they’re excluding people, they’ll choose to do better.”
Of course, this dear friend ghosted me like Casper when I asked her to mask at literary events.
When I drew a line between inaccessible buildings and pandemic ableism, straight through
Smiling hypocrites who ignore, accept, perpetuate, and benefit from both. Please let me explain.
Ableism normalizes, supports, rewards, uplifts, pleasures, and entitles abled people.
Abled people have always controlled the narrative. Policed the tone they’re willing to tolerate.
Enforced the meaning and moral of the story by controlling the language used to tell it.
For example, the historic exclusions of systemic ableism don’t sound like violence,
Or a violation of human rights, when you call them “urban beautification.”
From the mid-1800s, North American city beautifiers colluded to pass “Ugly Laws.”
The 1881 Chicago City Code made it illegal for these ugly beggars to appear in public:
“Diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be a disgusting object.”
Beautiful abled people thus ensured that disabled-ugly-not-quite-people got put in homes.
Got incarcerated in their own homes. By inaccessibility. By fear of ridicule. By poverty. By shame.
By fear of attack. By fear of police brutality and brutal imprisonment. Since ugly disabled people
Couldn’t be seen in the streets, nobody needed accessible buildings. Problem solved.
Victorian Scrooges’ approved: "Jail the poor in workhouses; jail the disabled in asylums.
Out of sight out of mind. Nobody wants to see or pay for that ugly bunch of crippled bastards."
In 2010, when my walker and I became accessibility advocates, this dogged little bastard
Was optimistic. I believed the exclusion of my community was easy to fix. That goodwill would win.
I offered a solution, two lines that hummed like a snippet of song from Karen Carpenter,
Riffed on her inviting refrain in, “We’ve Only Just Begun”:
“Together, let’s refuse to organize, attend, or work at any inaccessible events.
Together, let’s choose to relocate in inclusive love.” Such a sweet summer child!
I actually expected 21st century morality. Expected writers—you know,
Those well-read, well-educated, progressive supporters of diversity, equity, and inclusion—
To practice what they preached. A few did. Most didn’t. Most shrugged.
Pretended not to see the stairs they climbed. Stairs at the front door. Stairs to the stage.
A flight of stairs to the washroom in the basement. Stairs that keep me and my community out.
Ban us from launches, readings, retreats, and festivals. Ensure beautifully abled people
Get seen. Get hired. Get pleasured. Get to appoint themselves our bosses and erect this sign
On all jobs and worksites of CanLit: “NO DISABLED PEOPLE NEED APPLY.”
Then COVID hit. Then lockdown. Abled people newly incarcerated in their own homes swore:
“Never again. Inaccessibility sucks bigly. I don’t deserve it. I deserve pleasure.”
They swore they wouldn’t go back to normal because normal wasn’t working. But when
Politicians declared the pandemic over, abled people stampeded back to inaccessible buildings
Because normal absolutely works for them.
And to the victors go the spoils, all the material benefits of Ableism:
Access to buildings, events, resources, opportunities, sales, networking, fans, and friendships.
And, most to the point, unquestioning access to the I’m-the-boss entitlement of abled privilege.
Wherein the abled 77 percent oppress, exploit, and rob the disabled 23 percent.
And know it. And do it anyway, guilt free. And worse, in backsliding backlash, they double down,
Using physically inaccessible buildings to host medically inaccessible events.
Today, in mid-pandemic 2024, when COVID-responsible disabled, ill, and immunocompromised people
Share our lived experience with our double shunning, when we explain,
“Unmasked events risk our lives and the lives of all who attend them.
Masks ensure DEIA: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility.
Masks are self and community care. Please require masks at all events.”
The victors ignore us. We get dismissed. Talked over. Mocked. Gaslit. Told to stop living in fear.
Warned to stop fear mongering—if we know what’s good for us—if we want to belong.
It’s so anti-science. Of course, the instant a mask comes off, with one breath COVID is airborne.
Hunting down hosts. Demanding to breed. But as if they can’t be hunted, as if they can’t use Google,
CanLit continually puts the comfort and pleasure of abled people over disabled lives.
At best, as if doing us a favour, they offer this grudging, performative allyship:
“We’ll wear masks, except when eating or drinking.”
At this line, Bastardy Meets Abled Privilege Meets Male Pleasuring Bro Culture.
“Sure, baby,” privilege winks. “I’ll wear a condom, except when I’m ejaculating.”


<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bullying
I love improv comedy. Its communal creation. Its recursive pledge to look, look, and look again.
I adore its forced fit: the “marrying together” of two incongruous things. But it’s also
Precisely because that term reinforces rape culture that this little bastard, born in 1955,
Born from the force of date rape, longs to birth new forced fits. Longs to improvise tales that turn
Tables and screws, making scenes that force non-bastard, non-disabled people to look again.
On April 5, 2021, @emily_ladau tweeted, “Pssst: Accessibility isn’t actually accessible if
The person requesting it is made to feel they should be apologetic for doing so.”
It got 10.4K likes and resonated with the global disabled community: “Been there, done that.
Been made to feel apologetic by gatekeeping abled folks. More than once. All our lives.”
This tweet hit home for those incarcerated in our homes, because it outed one of ableism’s
Most used silencing tactics: shame. The weapon of mean girls who became mean women.
And boy bullies who never grew up. Both happily shame us and shrug.
That shrug draws their line in the sand. Throws their first punch as mean adults. It shouts:
“We can dispatch all ugly, disabled people like spiders. With impunity. Because
Ableism has punched our ticket to punch you out and keep you out.” It believes:
“We’re life worthy of life. You’re useless eaters.” When challenged, it threatens:
“Go back home where you came from. Stay shut in and shut up.” To ensure it, ableists launch
DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
DENY: The first tactic of all abled people is to pretend they’re doing nothing wrong.
“We’re sorry, but it’s not our fault; it’s the buildings that keep you out.”
“We’re sorry, but it’s impossible to relocate because we love our historic, signature venue.”
“We’re sorry, but those new accessible buildings cost too much money.” When we point out these Excuses would never be used to justify the exclusion of any other marginalized group,
And virtual events don’t free them of the ethical responsibility to also be in-person accessible,
Because disabled writers and attendees must be able to both attend and work at all events, they
ATTACK: Hate always begins with microaggressions. Disabled people get told nonstop:
Calm down. Speak softly. Be polite. Be patient. Be kind. Smile, baby!
It escalates to warnings: “If you continue to protest your exclusion, you’ll be disliked, unwanted.
You’ll be mocked, ghosted and shunned.” It escalates to name calling.
To the pre-emptive discrediting of mean women with slurs. Ironically, the same slurs
Hurled at 1970s feminists: Shrill. Angry. Bossy. Demanding. Bitchy. Ball breakers.
And used to silence anti-racist activists: too radical, too angry, too demanding, too threatening.
Even progressive DEI allies tell us, “You have to wait your turn. We’ll decide when it’s time.”
When we still refuse to self-silence, we face full frontal personal attacks.
Ageist ableists tell older disabled people, “You selfish, senile boomers should stick to knitting.”
Ableist macho men tell disabled women, “You’re not disabled, you’re just lazy, fat, and ugly.”
Racist white ableists tell disabled BIPOC, “Stop trying to play another victim card.”
Transphobic ableists tell disabled Transgender and nonbinary people,
“You’re doubly broken freaks who deserve to die.”
But it’s not just trolls who call disabled activists every filthy name attempting to sully our cause.
Like velociraptors, ableists hunt in packs. Individual punches escalate to collective pile-ons.
In the collective character assassination of whisper networks,
Ableists whip themselves into righteous, red-herring wrath proclaiming that
Disabled activists aren’t protesting a problem, we are the problem. We’re unfit messengers.
Too impolitely imperfect for their perfectly normal selves to have to see or pay for.
To wash themselves clean, ableists hurl a slurry kitchen sink of slander to drown us like
Unwanted, deformed puppies. Holding our heads under with collective hatred, they
Tell each other they have it on good authority we’re all nothing but an ugly bunch of
Racist Homophobic Transphobic TERFS and SWERFS. Too discredited to credit.
Each and every attacking word makes their real message clear:
“We intend to bully you into submission. We’ll blame every victim who dares to be a messenger.
We’re purposefully shaming you because we want to silence the next messenger.”
When, nevertheless, disabled people remain persistent, When we laugh at ableists and say,
“Discrediting one messenger never never discredits our collective message,” then ableists
REVERSE VICTIM AND OFFENDER: Far worse than the worst abuse of trolls,
Abled family, friends, and colleagues hear us calling them into accessible love, and pout.
They tell us to stop shaming them. To stop hating them. To please, please stop harming them.
In petulant abled fragility, they’re distraught, feel faint. They weep salty abled tears.
Oh, how our requests for true diversity, equity, and inclusion do hurt them!
With a hair-tossing display of aggrieved entitlement, they declare the matter closed.
Here’s the big picture: As ableists draw the world, all lines of DARVO reach the same endpoint:
Each vector rewards the victor. It’s this majority with real power—abled bystanders—
Who do the real harm. These amoral dinosaurs, this century's complicit enforcers of “Ugly Laws,”
Slither smugly back to normal. Mount stairs into buildings and onto stages.
Mount their abled high horses. Smile maskless for selfies. And shrug again.


Accountability------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

It’s my fault, if I’d convinced more people of the ethical urgency to end inaccessibility,
Before the pandemic, then perhaps the double backlash would be less violent today.
But I failed. More pointedly, we all failed because ableism is so pervasively powerful.
More seductive than any music. Just as bastardy cocoons, comforts and uplifts non-bastards,
Ableism enshrines and empowers abled privilege. As normal. As natural.
Because Governments, God and Darwin make it so, ableism entitles all abled people—
Yes, ALL abled people—to behave spoiled-little-boy badly.
To Make Ableism Great Again. To Win Bigly. To Keep Ableism Winning Forever.
Sylvia Plath nailed the forced fit of rape culture with this line:
“Every woman adores a fascist.” Here’s the Disability Justice version:
Capitalism grooms abled people to adore the beautifully abled fascist in the mirror.
Today, pandemic denial hands them a warm gun and assures them:
“Don’t worry, my perfect sons and daughters. You’ll never have to see or pay for
All the frail, old, and ugly, disabled bastards that you’ve maimed and killed.”
But when a virus breeds, it improvises. There’s always more harm.
Beyond the seven million global deaths and counting, the long gun of Long-COVID
Continues to aim straight at the lungs, brains, hearts, hopes, and futures,
Of every human we love. Of all who breathe air. Of life as we know it.
To prevent more mass murder and planetary disablement, we must draw accountable lines.
From my mother’s withholding of care, to the human family’s refusal to care enough.
From the powerful prioritizing male pleasure, to the oppression of ugly, imperfect others.
Of course we’re all being groomed to shrug at bastardy and ableism, so we’ll shrug at
Genocide in Gaza, a still-murdering pandemic, capitalist greed, and a terminal climate crisis.
As an ardent agent of capitalism, ableism deliberately divides to conquer.
Sharpens historic schisms between abled and disabled.
Between the young and healthy and the old, immunocompromised, and frail.
Between disabled people who can’t walk and disabled people who can.
Between visibly disabled people and disabled people who present as abled.
Ableism even entices some disabled people to walk right on by their own community.
I draw my line in the sand at them. Someday, disabled traitors who climb stairs to podiums and pose,
Maskless with arms around maskless abled writers (as if proximity inoculates, saves, and uplifts them)
Will be called to account. History will harshly judge all those who throw disabled people into the lime pit
To ingratiate themselves to our oppressors. Someday, all who join The Great Forgetting,
All who have agreed to pretend COVID is over, will be held to account.
Especially those with the real power—not the bullies—yet again, the bystanders.
It’s time to stop blaming governments. They have never and will never act in our interests.
Of course, Canada offers Medical Assistance in Death to disabled people Who Aren’t Dying.
Capitalist Scrooges want all their inferior Bob Cratchits to die quickly and compliantly.
Governments and cronies deliberately get richer by “decreasing the surplus population.”
They’ll always evade responsibility. Accountability must come from ordinary people.
It breaks my hope and my heart to see you refuse to be accountable. See you shrug at masks.
Watch you point the guns of your bodies at each other. Eagerly agreeing to kill and be killed.
Failing yourselves and each other, fueling eugenics like cheerful, dutiful, Neo-Nazi Tiny Tims.

<------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Belonging

In childhood, I loved All Creatures Great and Small, the tale of a rookie veterinarian
Force fit from Glasgow into the Yorkshire Dales. When young James Herriot gets embraced,
Uplifted by community and chosen family, even this lone little doggie in the window belongs.
I especially loved humming the book’s title. Taken from a joyful hymn I sang in choir,
Praising “all things bright and beautiful,” it proclaimed that all life belonged. In contrast,
In embittered old-lady snark, I originally entitled this essay, All Creatures Greedy and Small.
Instead, I choose to see Vera Lynn’s bluebirds. To hear the uplifting contralto of Ellen Naomi Cohen,
Refusing to reduce her to either Cass Elliot or Momma Cass. As she sings,
“Dedicated to the One I Love,” I dedicate this essay to all kinds of breathing love and sing along:
“The darkest hour is just before dawn.” Because this is the hour when new creatures are born.
When all humans can choose to become veterinarians of lines.
Pledge to assist in their creation, birth, care, feeding, growth, and vitality. Because
The lines we draw and respect for ourselves run straight as sheep dogs and swervy as snakes.
They escape a gathering hand, scatter like Pick-Up-Sticks, in tremulous touching.
Here's the crucial point: all lines—geometric, artistic, ideological—are human creations.
We drew them. We can erase them. Deconstruct, re-envisage, and realign them.
Lay them in intersecting thru-lines, from point A to B and beyond.
The question all lines pose is always the same: Which side are you on?
In this essay, I rule on all the lines in my life because the planet and I have so little time.
Having lived in both a passingly-abled body and a disabled body, I know
We’ll all pay with our lives for ignoring this truth: A poem is a bird. A book is a turtle.
All dinosaurs. One too quick, the other too slow, to save us.
Our hope lies in essays. In delineated arguments. In daring to essay a new hybrid forced fit.
Together, let’s imagine the vectors of new dinosaur-human kin.
Rewrite belonging anew, imbued with the optimistic resistance and reinvention
Of a mother velociraptor simultaneously slashing and rebirthing humankind.
Let’s bear witness. Let’s bear down. Together, let’s birth words of raging transformative joy.
We all have ink on our hands, smudged deep in the whorls of our fingerprints.