I have a prosthetic leg and my wife uses a wheelchair. I wrote a children’s book to normalize limb differences.

• James Catchpole has a prosthetic leg and has been asked about it for as long as he can remember.
• His wife has chronic pain, and their different experiences inspired him to write a children’s book.
• This is her story, told to writer Ashley Abramson.

This essay as stated is based on a conversation with James Catchpole. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve practically always had one leg. Losing a limb turns you into a walking question mark.

When I was a kid, kids on the playground would ask me what happened to me. I always felt it was my job to tell him. After all, adults often asked me the same question, so it was surely a reasonable question. I ended up writing a children’s book called “What happened to you?” about what it means to be asked this question. It took me 40 years to find the answer.

As I got older, I became more uncomfortable sharing my medical history with strangers. Adults think they want to know, but often they don’t, not when they realize it’s a personal question with a difficult answer. It makes everyone feel uncomfortable. And the kids don’t need to know what happened. They just need reassurance that, yes, some people have a leg, and that’s okay. Disability is normal.

My wife, Lucy, also has a disability.

I learned more about how people relate to disability when I met my wife. I was a student at Oxford when my cousin matched me up with someone she knew, a recent graduate who also happened to have a disability. Lucy and I have been together for 19 years.

While we are both disabled, our experiences of disability are very different. As a single leg through the hip amputee, my appearance is dramatic. I have an artificial leg that I use at home, but in public I get around on crutches. And when I say “move”, I mean “go fast” – I used to run (I’ve slowed down now, but I still play soccer with my sticks). However, when we first met, Lucy appeared to be in good physical condition, but her mobility and stamina were severely limited by constant, severe pain.

So, essentially, we were opposites. On the bus, little old ladies would jump up and offer me their seats, no matter how much I preferred to stand. In a bar, Lucy couldn’t sit on a stool for love or money. And when she was forced to explain your disabilitythey often did not believe it. The contrast between our experiences made me think more consciously about the way the world responded to me. I began to wonder why people felt entitled to know.

Changing careers and becoming parents started a new chapter for us.

I was thinking of a career in classical music, but with Lucy’s health declining, I began looking for work closer to home. I took over a family business, my mother’s children’s literary agency, after Lucy and I were married. I had been helping out with the agency for years, reading submissions and editing, so it felt natural to take the role. And Lucy graduated in English literature; she reads much better than me. So the agency was a shared project, just like becoming parents.

We were somewhat concerned with the logistics of having children, but whether we would even try was never really a question. I was always going to be the feeder, diaper changer, cook, and cleaner. Lucy has to spend most of her time in bed, but she is the teacher and comforter of our 4 and 8 year old daughters. She’s a different setup than a lot of families, but for our girls, I think there’s safety in knowing where her mom is all the time.

Taking our daughters to the playground reminded me of the questions children ask

Since my daughters have a father with one leg and a mother in a wheelchair, disability is completely normal for them. (The bio on our Instagram account @thecatchpoles reads: “More kids than working legs.”) But becoming a parent meant going back to playgrounds, which reminded me how unforgiving kids can be when they see someone who looks disabled. .

I was hearing the same questions that I used to hear as a kid. A few years ago, I began responding to children by saying, “What you Do you think that happened?” My friend’s son, Casper, asked me if a thief had stolen my leg. A boy at my daughter’s school asked if a lion had eaten it.

One day, in a museum, a boy asked if he had fallen down the toilet. Returning the question to the kids was a good way to deflect it, plus his answers were always funny. And in the back of my mind, I was wondering if there might be a story to all of this.

I decided to write my own book on disability.

As a literary agent, I have always received proposals for children’s books written by parents of children with disabilities. These parents write about disability for the best of reasons because they want to see their children represented on the page. But none of the presentations seemed true to me. It’s hard to write about disability if you don’t have first-hand experience.

Then I got a pitch from an illustrator named Karen George, who had no intention of writing about disability. But the main character of her was a one-legged teddy bear. I didn’t take the story from her, but I suggested that we could collaborate on a new one that she could tell. She generously agreed.

Then it was time to put it all together: memories of my childhood on the playground, being asked that question over and over again as I grew older, meeting Lucy, and seeing how people responded to her disability instead of the mine, to return to the playground as a parent with my own children.

Because here’s the thing: having strangers ask you deeply personal questions, questions like “What happened to you?” and if you are a wheelchair user or have other visible differences, “What’s wrong with you?” — can be one of the most difficult things disabled people face in their daily lives. Those questions point to you, remind you of your difference, and demand that you tell someone your most intimate and traumatic truths, just to satisfy their passing curiosity.

I wanted to write a book that would show readers what it feels like from the perspective of a disabled child. He wanted them to walk in Joe’s shoe, the main character.

In “What happened to you?” a boy named Joe is playing pirates on the playground, but the kids keep asking what happened to his leg. He doesn’t feel like telling that story and eventually the kids learn that they don’t need to know what happened and that Joe’s game seems more fun anyway. My hope is that both the children and the adults who read to them learn that asking a disabled person to share their medical history is like asking a person why they are bald, only a little more traumatic (I suppose). Fundamentally, “What happened to you?” it’s a very personal question, and even children have to learn that we don’t ask personal questions of people we don’t know.

Having a visible disability can be like being a very low-key celebrity: no glamor but all the looks. Writing my own story as a picture book with a cartoon version of me on the cover and seeing that book being read in schools and sold around the world in different languages ​​feels cathartic. I’ve finally been able to put my dramatic appearance to good use. It even gives me a very modest degree of actual celebrity, at least, in the eyes of my daughters.