'Mama Car' smashes disability stereotypes in a delightful way

By Louise Kinross

Mama Car is a new British picture book that explains a mother's wheelchair from the perspective of her young children.

To author Lucy Catchpole's daughters, her wheelchair is the "mama car"—a place to snuggle with mom with wheels to take you on all kinds of adventures. 

This is how Lucy describes the book on Instagram.

"This is a very personal book. When my children were little, they called my wheelchair the 'mama car.' The actual car was 'the big car,' and Daddy’s trike was the 'dada car.' Which makes sense to a two-year-old—everything with wheels is a car.

As adults, the way we relate to wheelchairs is steeped in prejudice. When picture books have taken on wheelchairs, it’s often a direct reaction to that—look, it isn’t shameful! It’s actually very cool and fast! And wheelchairs can indeed be very cool and fast—as we’ll all be reminded soon, with the Paralympics coming. And there is absolutely a place for the books that celebrate that.

But children don’t see the shame, not at first anyway. And as a disabled mother, this doesn’t reflect the way me or my children relate to my wheelchair.

Small children are unreasonably, irrationally proud of their parents, and my wheelchair is an extension of that. They sit in it, play under it, beautify it, occasionally injure themselves on it. It’s a centre of instant coziness—a permanent lap, always there.

And why should it be surprising, that children don’t see the stigma? After all, it’s such an obvious, simple tool—literally a chair with wheels. Who doesn’t like a chair, and who doesn’t like wheels? But somehow, when you put the two together, you end up with something highly stigmatized. And when you use one, all sorts of presumptions are made about you. That can be a heavy burden to carry through the world.

Since I became disabled at 19, I’ve become used to navigating all the strange ways the world treats me. But for my children, I am as I am. There is no alternative world in which they were born to a non-disabled mother. Their love for my disabled body, and my wheelchair, was a wonderful shock.

For my children, with a wheelchair-using mother and amputee father, disability is normal. Not inspiring or tragic—just, normal."

Mama Car is geared to kids from babies to age six. It belongs in daycare, school and home libraries. Lucy Catchpole and her husband James run The Catchpole Agency, a literary agency in Oxford, England specializing in children's books. The British paperback of Mama Car was published by Faber & Faber. A North American hardcover version will be released by Little, Brown in the fall of 2025. Read more about Mama Car.

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