ARTICLE 1: Every mother has the right to live her own life and not let the hardships push her into believing that her life does not matter.
ARTICLE 2: Every mother has the right to define her experiences and problems in her own words and terms.
ARTICLE 3: Every mother has the right for her life to be understood in the context of her child’s neurodiverse experiences and in the context of her socio-cultural context.
ARTICLE 4: Every mother has the right to include others who are important to her in the process of reclaiming her life from the effects of intense hardships.
ARTICLE 5: Every mother has the right to be free from having problems caused by hardships located inside her, internally, as if there is some deficit in her. The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.
ARTICLE 6: Every mother has the right for her responses to hardship to be acknowledged. No one is a passive recipient of trauma. People always respond. People always protest injustice.
ARTICLE 7: Every mother has the right to have her skills and knowledges of survival and resistance respected, honoured and acknowledged.
ARTICLE 8: Every mother has the right to know and experience that what she has learnt through hardship can make a contribution to others in similar situations.
*Adapted from The Narrative Therapy Charter of Story-telling Rights by David Denborough, which was adapted from the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Photo © Mimi Chakrabarti
