City Council Candidate Chloe Eudaly Pens Personal Essay on Mothering Disabled Son

The piece in True Parent magazine details her evolution from "disability super mom."

Before Chloe Eudaly, a lefty candidate for the Portland City Council, gave birth to her first child in 2001, one of her biggest fears was that the baby would grow up to become a Republican.

That worry was soon eclipsed by a new reality when, as she writes in an essay published in the fall issue of True Parent magazine, she gave birth to a baby boy whose umbilical cord was wound tightly around his neck. Months later, doctors diagnosed her son, Henry, with cerebral palsy due to oxygen deprivation that damaged his brain.

"I won't lie—it wasn't pretty," she writes. "I felt like I had broken my baby, like I had failed at the first major hurdle of motherhood. I became determined to do everything in my power to make up for it."

For two years, Eudaly devoted herself and her son to attending weekly medical appointments with a variety of specialists.

"[U]ndeterred by the fact that Henry's development was veering further off track from a host of developmental milestones, I persevered," she writes. "Believing that I was doing everything right, everything I could, every day, was the only thing holding me together."

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Appropriately for a person like Eudaly, who's devoted her professional career to independent publishing, the twist in Eudaly's story came when she happened upon a self-published book on the shelves at Powell's around 2003. That book, Disability is Natural: Revolutionary Common Sense for Raising Successful Children with Disabilities, championed a new attitude toward parenting a disabled child, one that deemphasized a child's deficits.

"[M]y most important job was still to help my child become the best person he was born to be," she realized then. "I needed to relinquish my superhero cape to become a disability world dropout."

The essay offers a glimpse into Eudaly's political trajectory, from Gulf War protestor to Special Education PTA leader and from affordable housing advocate to city council candidate. Check it out here.

Eudaly faces Commissioner Steve Novick in the November election.

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