The Four Walls of My Freedom Read Online Free PDF Page A

from my usual ire. I was pregnant. Jim and I had been trying for another child, and the previous year I had experienced the sadness of a “missed abortion” — our embryo had died in utero. But this baby was meant to be and nine months later, our Natalie was born, a sister for Nicholas. A few moments after her appearance in the operating room, the doctors placed Natalie on the steel table to wash her. Lying on her stomach, she pushed up with her arms, lifting her upper body off the table. Natalie was only a few minutes old and already she could perform a move that Nicholas could only imagine! Mothering a healthy baby was a revelation to me. With each of Natalie’s milestones, the extent of Nicholas’ differences was revealed in harsh light. With her first steps, I cheered and cried tears of amazement and pride mingled with sadness for Nick’s loss.
    But babies have a way of seducing those who care for them and Natalie firmly established her personhood almost immediately. I was more nervous than a first-time mother, thinking I was incapable of sensing what a “normal” baby might need or want. Soon I knew her hungry cry from her painful ones. I knew her frustration with confinement — suddenly the world had shifted to make room for another kind of future for our family.

CHAPTER TWO
    Amartya Sen and
the Capability Approach
    In many ways, the peripatetic lifestyle of diplomacy has been good for our family. As a young couple, our first posting was to Moscow in 1978. Living with limited freedoms there taught us the value of resilience and creativity when faced with oppression. Later, a second posting in Washington, DC, was memorable for career-building and weekends at the East Coast seaside with friends. But when Nicholas and Natalie arrived in our family, the idea of packing up seemed daunting, yet I was determined to try. London beckoned and four years in England proved to us that not only could we travel, but we could also thrive in a foreign land. We returned to Ottawa and lived quietly for ten years. Then in 2006, Jim told me that the prime minister had asked him to be high commissioner in London, and I was thrilled. I play-acted thinking about the offer, and then shouted “Yes!” as we laughed and hugged each other and the children. On August 27, 2006, we arrived in London and moved in to No. 3 Grosvenor Square, the official residence of the Canadian high commissioner.
    Until recently, I had not considered writing a book about our family life with Nicholas. I always believed that Nick’s disability was an accident of nature and had no bearing on society in general. I knew from experience that when I began to talk to most people about my daily life, their eyes would glaze over and they would turn away, muttering excuses. Anyway, the disability community did not need another piece of misery porn or worse still, inspirational lit. But all that changed in 2008 during a casual conversation with Dr. Susan Hodgett of Ulster University in Belfast. Susan had nominated my husband, Jim, to receive an honorary doctorate from her university on account of his own and Canada’s role in forging an enduring peace in Northern Ireland (Jim had worked on the peace process during our previous posting to the UK in the 1990s).
    As Susan and I stood waiting for Jim to be capped and gowned, we chatted about my interest in learning lessons for disability and nonprofit work from those working in the area of development and extreme poverty. Susan breathed in and said quietly, “You should know about Amartya Sen.” As she began to describe Sen’s ideas, I almost felt the earth shift underfoot. I realized that using Sen’s ideas of human freedom and potential gave Nicholas’ life and my own experience an important ethical connection to the rest of society. If his ideas could be harnessed as a language to speak about having the freedom to live a life of value even for us , then this