Nobody is thankful for the disability trenches. No thank you for wiping rear ends way past the expected age range or getting hair pulled out during a meltdown. I don't see the praises for IEPs that haven't really changed in years because the level of learning is pretty much the same year after year. And no Hallelujah for when high school is finished for the virtually unemployable. We only hear … [Read more...]
If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It
There are two vases in our home at each side of our front door. One of the vases fell and the top was broken off and now it has a crack in it. Instead of throwing it away we put it back together. It's a little more fragile than the other vase but it's still beautiful. Can you tell which one is broken? You have to get up close to see the imperfection because though the vase is cracked it still … [Read more...]
Schools Over, Now What?
Do you stress over when school ends and you have no idea what your child will do over the summer? Do you worry how you will pay for that special camp? Are you nervous about not finding a "special" camp? Are you afraid they will forget what they have been learning? Well, I have a confession. I do this sometimes. My son just finished his 7th-grade year and now he had his first day of … [Read more...]
A Rain Day
For the first 20 years of my life, rain was something to be avoided. Not that rain wasn't a good thing, it just wasn't something human beings engaged. If the weather report said we were going to have rain all day, it was a day off from school. No, the schools didn't close, but it was as if they did, for both students and staff are likely to be missing. And this was warm rain, since the average … [Read more...]
Bitter or Better?
I can remember it like it was yesterday. The sassy, obese mother of a teenage boy on the autism spectrum, sitting there each week as her son’s adaptive aquatics class overlapped with my young son's session -- We would chat on occasion. She was always so snarky, spouting off about her useless husband, her irritating teenagers, and the limitless ways life had done her wrong. I swear there was a … [Read more...]
“Fear Is a Lie From the Pit of Hell”
Those words were so unexpected that they knocked me off my feet. And, yet, I knew exactly what he meant. Without hesitation, I wrote them into my iPhone. I didn’t want to forget what Joel Houston, leader of the Christian band Hillsong UNITED, had just said. In sharing stories over the years with many, many parents of children with a disability, I’ve learned that fear is the one thing that holds … [Read more...]