More on "My Dream House"

badbookworm has turned it into a meme, like so.

And I'll up the challenge: if a bunch of folks in my DWircle and F'list answer this meme, then I could draw a wee picture of our "Internet neighborhood," with all our fantasical houses on a sort of map / cityscape thing. It would likely rival any movie set of a Tim Burton fantasy, I tell you what.

[ETA: Sorry. I seem to have linked to a locked post. The rule of this "meme" is to post 5 or 6 things about your "dream house." That's it. All the rest is optional.

Actual plausibility, practicality, and/or affordability need not apply, but can apply, if you want. You can number your lists or bullet-point them, or not, your choice. Things you might want to include, but do not have to: What's the yard like? Neighborhood? Is it outfitted with fancy tech or magical powers?

That sort of thing.]

It's times like this I **REALLY** wish my mother were still alive. Also: GIP thanks to Spiralsheep.

So. I'm writing a post, right now, for Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream, and I want to make the point that the reason why so many depictions of the Lame, Maimed, Blind and Dumb[*] are written from the P.O.V. of able-bodied privilege is that, often, even in societies that strived for "universal education," the laws only specified that "every able-bodied child be taught... no one seemed to care whether disabled kids could read (much less write), or not.

I know that the United States Congress didn't even address the legal requirement to teach handicapped kids until 1975. I also know that I was "mainstreamed" in my various public school districts as early as 1969. And that I know that (until I got to college campuses starting in 1983) I was always the only disabled kid in any of my classes.

What I don't know, and what I really, really, really (not enough caps lock or underlining or bolding in the world could emphesize that enough) want to know is: What my mother went through to ensure I got all the education I was capable of living up to.

I was 5 when I entered school, I was probably 4, or younger, when she started pushing. I was too young to notice what she was doing. And my dad, well... his heart was in the right place, but he was a man of his time, and probably thought of education and all that as a "woman's purview" (Don't worry, he grew out of it, eventually). Besides, he was an airline pilot, and was gone on trips three or four days out of every week. So really, my mother is probably the only one who could really tell me what the local school district required or expected for me and kids like me (my teachers were also great -- mostly -- it's the higher-up beaurocrats in Administration I wonder about).

But my mom died 20 years ago, this coming October.

*sigh.*