Future Clinic for Critical Care: MOTHER: Exploring Crip Maternal Time in the Theatre

Nina Mühlemann focuses on experiences of disabled parenthood, and particularly motherhood, as they are constantly erased, partially because they run counter to common preconceptions around care, which always cast disabled people as receivers of care, not givers. In a 2019 theatre performance of the collective Future Clinic for Critical Care entitled “MOTHER,” the collective tried to address the gendered, abled and heteronormative expectations the term “mother” holds and to make space for forms of mothering that live outside of these expectations. This chapter deals with the fraught intersection of motherhood, time and disability dealing with those intersections and the erasure of crip temporalities in relation to mothering on a personal level.
The intersection of motherhood, time and disability is fraught with well-intended statements by nondisabled parents: “I understand how you feel as a disabled person, now that I am a parent everything takes longer for me too, because getting around with a baby is hard.” Just like every other parent in history I completely understand that sentiment, but it is not the same as my lived experience as a disabled person. In a few years, your baby will most likely be able to walk, and after a little while you will have forgotten how long it took you to get out of the house, or how few step free tram stops there are, or that these experiences should possibly inform your political choices. And on top of that, these statements erase the experiences of disabled parents, who have to deal with a world that can be hostile towards people, especially women and those read as women, with small children and a world that regularly and systemically excludes disabled bodyminds.