ABSTRACT
Mothers newly encountering a diagnosis of disability can assert their child’s full personhood and reclaim their own motherhood through emplotting their children’s lives in anticipation of a story ending in which disability is overcome. In doing so, they both accept a medical model that “defines disability as permanent biological impediment and positions individuals with disabilities as less able than those who can recover from illness or who are non-disabled” (Gilson and DePoy, 2000: 207-288) and reject the applicability of the model to their own child.
