When something breaks

On broken systems, invisible weight, and the people who hold us together

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

My son’s wheelchair broke, and I couldn’t fix it.

Obviously, it broke on a weekend. No helplines open, no process to follow, no way to know what came next. Just me, spiralling. Remembering all the stories I’d been told by other parent-carers: the mum on Instagram documenting day after day of waiting, trapped in her own house because the system kept failing her. The unanswered calls. The endless re-explaining.

And then it was me, carrying my son into school because he couldn’t be transported the usual way. Carrying him to the car. Trying to work out how we would leave the house and get to appointments. Trying to work out what we would do if he needed to go to hospital. Me rearranging meetings, emailing colleagues, panicking that this ‘temporary inconvenience’ would quietly become long-term.

Later in the week, I cried in the school car park. Despite following the process, despite pleading for help, we still had no chair. We still didn’t know what was going to happen.

But I wasn’t crying because of a broken chair. Not really. I was crying about the six years of fighting: for funding, for placements, for the most basic support. And because I suddenly realised I had nothing left in me to fight again.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I still made the calls. I phoned a charity that offered emergency equipment loans, only to be told he didn’t qualify — because he wasn’t dying right then, right there. I listened as the nurse on the hotline read our file and quietly offered condolences for the death of my son’s twin brother. And I broke, again - not because of the chair - but because of all the things I couldn’t fix.

Driving past other parents walking their children into mainstream school, hand in hand, I felt the rupture in our world. How easy it would be to wave him off at the school gate. To watch him skipping into the distance, with no need to rely on equipment and phone calls and charitable funding. My son couldn’t understand why his world had suddenly shifted. Why his mam’s face was wet. He disassociated. He wouldn’t sleep at night. I will sort this, I told him, my eyes boring into his.

And yet — there were people who caught me. Teachers who knew him. Medical professionals who knew me. People who broke protocol to offer a hug, to send an email on my behalf, to say: you are not alone.

Because it wasn’t really about the chair at all.

It was about what happens when something essential breaks and you realise you’re not in control. How the fault line runs through every part of your life: your work, your family, your sense of yourself. And how, sometimes, the only thing that steadies you is someone else’s kindness in the middle of it all.

I go back home. I triage emails. I write my objectives for my upcoming appraisal. I carry on. The chair is still broken.

Photo by Andrew Shelley on Unsplash

This piece is free for everyone, because I think it matters that people hear how things break, but I explore more of these behind-the-scenes realities in The Deep End, my paid subscriber space.