Wedding Vows And Disability

Kimberly Elise and Shemar Moore.

Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman flashes through my mental screen when I see someone pushing someone in a wheelchair.

They could be man and wife, sister and brother or health care worker and patient.  They are man and wife in the 2005 film.  Charles, a big shot lawyer in love with himself, did his wife Helen wrong, threw her out like a pile of old magazines, but she took him back when he survived gun shot wounds from a dissatisfied client. 

Helen nursed him back to health because of wedding vows.  Some couples write their own vows.  It would be interesting to have a peak and see if disability is spelt out in black and white.  Tyler Perry captured on film, what happens in real life all over the world. 

There are many examples.  A second younger wife dumped a famous singer at the first wife’s doorstep, just before he died from HIV/AIDS.  A family was torn apart when a man who left four kids under the age of ten, came back when they were grown up, highly educated and owned their own businesses.     

‘He is your father,’ said the woman, who brought them up by selling chickens.

Wedding vows and disability do not make headlines like fairy tale weddings and 20 karat rocks on women’s fingers.  Being there for each other in a sports car on a highway somewhere in Dublin or a wheelchair should be the cement that binds.

By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.