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Nicole Jankowski

I'm a writer, mother, and lover with a penchant for vintage fascinators, Ernest Hemingway stories, and big laughers. Traveling reminds me of my smallness and inspires my gratitude. I'm a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll, but my heart belongs to Motown. Check out my blog at Don't hate the player, hate the game.

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Lawyers' Committee

Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights

Just a few short years ago, I was sitting in the family room with my husband, entertained by Donald Trump’s aloof presence in the boardroom.

We were laughing over the crazy antics of the contestants on his television show, "The Apprentice."

Now it’s 2016, and Donald Trump is running for president of the United States of America. And I’m not laughing now.

Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images.

In fact, I’m terrified. I’m terrified that Trump — an ableist, a man who openly and publicly discriminates against people with disabilities (or the perception of disability) — is potentially weeks away from holding the highest office in the land.

Now, Trump is laughing.

He was laughing as he openly mocked Serge Kovaleski. Kovaleski is a New York Times reporter who was born with arthrogryposis, a physical disability which noticeably impairs the joints in his body. "The poor guy, you ought to see this guy," Trump boomed over the adoring faces in the crowd.

Carried by the rising fire in his words, the people in the audience were swept up in the message. They laughed, too.

As a mother of a disabled child, I watched this on television in my living room. And I cried.

I wrung my hands in fear, questioning how this man and his supporters could possibly find any compassion for my son. My son has severe autism, and at almost 13 years old, he can barely speak. He often makes strange sounds and delivers odd jolting gestures at awkward moments. He is smart and sweet, complicated and mysterious.

Image via iStock.

I watched in paralyzing fear as Trump honed his relationship with radio host Michael Savage.

He has delivered one troubling, disturbing message on Savage’s show after another. Savage, in turn, has made a bid to be Trump’s head of the National Institute of Health. This is a man who, in 2008, claimed that "nearly every child with autism is a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out."

I watched in horror as Trump contributed to the dangerous anti-vaccine movement.

He tweets destructive messages that strengthen the already dangerous fear of autism in this country. "Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes—AUTISM. Many such cases!" he disjointedly tweeted in 2014.

As a mother of a disabled child, I know Trump in the White House means four years of few real solutions for my son, and that is terrifying.

It likely means no empathy for the plight of families contending with autism in this country. It likely means no support but lots of fear.

If Trump wins this election, he will undoubtedly continue to spread misinformation about autism and developmental disabilities. He cares much more about being right than he does about the truth. And so as Trump’s version of how autism is caused permeates society, I fear we will have a nation of under-immunized children.

Image via iStock.

I lie awake at night in fear, wondering if a Trump administration will again take us back to the days when even talking about my son’s disability felt like a punishable offense.

Those were days when mentioning "autism" as an insurance code was enough to have the doctor’s visit immediately rejected by our insurer.

If Donald Trump becomes president, I believe my family has so much to lose. And I’m scared.

Now, as a family, we have made peace with autism. My son is part of autism, and autism is a part of him. I do not think we would change it — it’s been part of us so long.

But I'm worried because you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat those who need help: the temporarily infirm, the disabled and the elderly, the sick and the poor. Those who have a path harder to walk than most. It’s an idea that goes beyond Republican and Democrat and floats in the soft space of humanity: taking care of those people in our country that cannot, through no fault of their own, care for themselves.

As Trump laughs at disabled reporters, mocks a deaf actress, and questions essential foundations of national health, I worry about the future — my future, my son’s future, your future. Trump's lack of empathy is what truly makes me afraid.

I worry that if Trump is our president, there will be a dangerous shift in tolerance toward children and adults like my son.

If the president of the United States makes fun of disabled persons, who will stop the children on the playground? Will my son be the victim of taunts and harassment from kids or even grown adults who are just modeling the behavior of the most powerful man in the country?

I can’t vote for the school-yard bully. So, world, I have a simple request: Think about your own children. And if you can, think about mine.

Electing Donald Trump will speak dangerous loud volumes — far more than a parent’s words could ever say. That kind of president is not one I want.

The other times will have their own meaning, with different value and depth, but when you meet your first child, it will be that very thing: the first time, never to be replicated again.

She will be impossibly small, and her chin will waver with an accusing uncertainty from the moment they place her warm body into your arms. How can you be my mother? You don’t look like you know what you’re doing.

And this will be true because, of course, you do not have the slightest clue.

You will assess the situation together, this first child and you. As a mother, you will notice the indentations where her knuckles should be, the rolls of fat that circle around her neck, her mottled skin and bald head. Improbably, she will seem insanely beautiful. Terrifyingly fragile.

She will hate the loudness of the room, the brightness of the lights. She will miss her old, wet burrow, with its cramped safe corners and dark shadows. Her furry brow will fold slowly. Then her unseeing eyes will blink up into the near space between the both of you, where you hold her close to your chest. Well, I guess this is it. We will have to make the best of it.

And then she will begin to cry. And you will begin to cry too.

In a day’s time, you will bring your daughter home and grow her up, in all the ways you know.

You will figure out how. She who knew from the beginning you never knew it all will regard you with purpose anyway.

She will do amazing things while you are worrying away the time. While you are cutting away the crusts. She will grow milk teeth and then grown-up ones. Someone named Mrs. Bastien will teach her cursive and make her learn which is the left hand and which is the right. She will save worms from baking on the sidewalk in the sun. She will love the things you hate and hate the things you love, and you will drive each other mad — all before she learns to drive.

Me and my daughter, Annabelle. Photo by Nicole Jankowski.

As her mother, you will do amazing things, too.

You will learn to need less: less sleep, less care, less time. You will give more. You will learn to tell the difference between "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the recorder, but it will hurt. You will not say things you would almost always have said, just to keep the peace. What hard strength there is in the measurement of unsaid words. You will be in a hurry to get to the better times when the times are worn and exhausting. Then you will hold your breath and wish it would all just stop spinning, when you realize how quickly 5 years old became 10 and then 10 years old became 15.

You will cut your own teeth, sharply, on the mothering of this first child. You will do the worst job this first time. But it will be the purest experience, the one that lives forever in your gut. The one that makes you homesick, always, for the time when she did not know anything but you and it was all so very new and unfiltered.

It will be wonderful and terrible, heartbreaking and tumultuous. You will hate it sometimes, and you will love it. You will stand nearby and watch her figure out the balance of things with the eye of someone so simultaneously invested and so incredibly powerless. It will hurt you more than she can know.

Do not tell her how much it hurts.

One day you will be counting her fingers and her toes, and the next, you will see her looking off into some foggy distance and she will be smiling. It will be the first time you realize she is counting the days until she leaves you for her first adventure, all alone.

You have only minutes now, it seems, until she leaves the house for the last time with her bedroom door wide open. There are only fleeting ribbons of days and wispy years until the last time she goes — the time she goes away, when she won’t be coming back again.

For the very first time.

Family

A girl made a comment about my body at the beach. This was my response.

Can you really judge how 'healthy a woman is by the thick, fleshy curve of her hip?

Standing in the kitchen, my thick thighs rubbing together underneath my skirt, I am slowly working the premade pizza dough to stretch.

It came in a plastic bag, this dough, from one of those “cook at home” meal box programs — the kind you try because you have a coupon for a free week and then ultimately pay for a few more weeks because you forget to cancel the service (because it costs way too much).

The meals I have ordered from this service are touted as both “healthy” and “vegetarian,” which are not, in case you didn’t know, synonymous terms in the least. I know this because I am primarily the latter (a vegetarian) and aspire to be the former (health-conscious), but it’s a difficult reconciliation.

I want to be “healthy.” I try to be "healthy."

I don’t eat much meat, but I eat a lot of cheese and brussels sprouts. And spinach. I read ingredient labels; I put back the bread where the first word listed is "enriched."

I drink a green smoothie every morning. Whir, whir. Pulsing the blender with my fingers, adding the chia, the flax. I like the taste, the texture. The green. I imagine the antioxidants swerving through my veins, Go Go Gadget Vitamin E.

Of course, I also eat dessert. Everyone knows there’s not much meat in dessert. And I really like dessert.

If you’re into that sort of thing, perhaps you can judge how much I like dessert by the way my thighs rub together. You can judge how much I like brie by the soft wobble of my upper arm, the part that keeps on waving long after my hand has signaled hello. You can judge every part of me that you see, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do.

If that’s the kind of thing you like to do, I won’t judge.

But what about the spinach? And the smoothie? Do you see my love for flaxseed in the strong sloping hardness of my back? Are you looking at the whites of my eyes and the thickness of my hair, a braid down my back, a silver-dollar-sized hunk? Can you see my sturdy bones? The pinkish hardened healthy half-moons of my nails?

It’s not about the way you look. I’m concerned for your health.

But really, can you judge how healthy a woman is by the thick, fleshy curve of her hip?

Does being a size 12, 14, 16 alone really mean my days are numbered? Is this the only answer that matters? Those who want to judge are much more apt to assess my healthfulness based on the number inside of my bathing suit versus the number on the paperwork from my doctor’s lab — they believe the measure of a healthy woman is the measure of her thighs. Forget science. Forgo numbers. Screw you, doctor. It’s modern beauty we should worry about. This tells me all I need to know about this woman.

If you are into that sort of thing, if you are the type to make a judgment based only on what you see, then you are not really my type at all.

It’s your health I worry about. It’s not about the way you look. Oh, but it is. It’s about the way YOU look at ME.

In a dress, as I sing karaoke. In soft pants, as I order some spaghetti. In my bathing suit, my beautiful bathing suit, at the ocean.

When you look, what you don’t see:

I’m strong. I can teach an 8-year-old girl to ride a two-wheeler in one Saturday afternoon and carry six bags of groceries in one trip from the car.

My brain is fueled by flaxseeds and sometimes chocolate croissants — it writes essays about love and sex and skin and kindness and dresses and teenagers and addiction and death and gratitude.

Sometimes my thighs rub together while I knead pizza dough.

Sometimes I am the only one in the house strong enough to open a jar of dill pickles.

Once I carried a bed up two flights of stairs, all by myself.

You can’t find those things, these intangible things, in the thick knot of flesh above my knees.

So they do not matter.

Here is what matters:

A girl at the beach whispered, “I like that fat girl’s bathing suit!” when I walked by.

I swam way out to where the waves drowned that girl’s voice.

Then I swam back in again.

I am the fat girl in the green bathing suit. It’s emerald, really, against the porcelain slope of my flesh. Green like a mermaid’s fin. All this flesh, my glorious oyster.

“They only make this suit for fat girls,” I said quietly to that girl, as I sifted my way back to my place in the sand. And her face turned red, but I smiled kindly at her anyway. Maybe she didn’t know I could hear her. Maybe she hadn’t meant it with disdain.

I smiled at that girl.

Sometimes the careful measure of my words, the beautiful measure of my style, the growing measure of my strength and my character is far greater than the size of my hips.

If only someone were interested in judging that.

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