Last week my husband asked my son and I if we would go to his new workplace and meet him for a break. I said yes. I wished we hadn’t.

When we got there, his boss (who hasn’t been at the office for months) was suddenly on site. He saw us gathered, and came over to say hi. He said hi to Tristan and shook his hand, bid us a good day, and left. I was very uncomfortable with it all.

See, about 4 years ago, I learned a lesson on human behaviour. I was working for a well-known realtor, and I disn’t share Tristan’s condition with my employer because I didn’t want to go there. He found out from an employee and asked me about it.

“Gosh, it must take a lot of money to take care of your son’s needs,” he commented. I replied it didn’t, really, Tristan was still walking, and the Ministry took care of his equipment etc.

The next week I was fired.

One could say it could be based on poor job performance, or lack of funds or whatever. But he never gave me a concrete answer. But I think I know why: I was a mother of a diabled boy. I was a liability.

I’ve seen this time and time again, in fact ,with a girlfriend, whose son recently went through chemo for an unusual kidney cancer, and when she returned to work, they had given her union shifts to another woman (they said all along the shifts would be waiting for her when she got back). It was some lame explanation like, ‘this other woman had gained more seniority in your absence.” Something like that.

I’m not sure what the fall-out will be with my hubby’s new employer. I’m waiting to see what he’s made of. Will the vision of a disabled boy in a wheelchair cause him to panic and make up stories in his own head? Will he see us as a liability? Or will he see us as just another family struggling with issues, like all families do, and he just happened to see the visual representation of it in a little boy in a lime-green wheelchair?

We’ll see.

Karen