5 Things I Want To Help You With
I want you to come here to feel seen. So many of the experiences we have as parents of kids with special needs feels like they happen in a vacuum. There’s a big community event happening in my town this week with a midway and activities and even a rodeo and basically the whole town goes to at least some part of it. Daily, I get asked if I’m taking the kids. Usually I just politely say, I’m not sure yet, but deep down inside I’m full of anxiety about how stressful a midway is for ME if my kids are with me. People with “normal” kids don’t worry about the things that I have to – like my girl running away, declining to listen well enough to maintain her personal safety or, when she’s had enough, just lying on the ground and refusing to get up. If you’re here, then maybe your kiddo has similar struggles and you feel the same worries and dread that I do about what may happen each time you leave the house or routine. So much of what I feel I lack is other parents who truly understand what I’m going through on a daily basis. I hope we can help support each other.
I want to help you tap into your inner roar. I am a big believer in intuitive parenting and life in general. I feel like deep down, every mother knows exactly what her kids need and how best to support them, but we don’t always have the tools and resources to meet those needs. In my practice I speak with hundreds of new and experienced mothers every year and I love seeing them get in touch with this very primal connection we have with our babies. There was a while there when I was worried that new moms had lost that gut instinct. They seemed happy to throw their arms in the air and leave all the tough decisions up to “experts” online or status quo things their kids “need to have”, but the truth is that the only expert on your kid is YOU. Every child is different and only you get to experience how your kids behave, develop and grow. My dream is for you to become so strong in your gut instincts about your family that when you feel like something is not quite right that you never second guess yourself and that you’re brave enough to speak up. I hope I can foster that inner voice in you so you can be a calm, confident mama even if your life sometimes feels like a tornado.
I want to show you the ways we work in our household to get things done, beautify our spaces and figure out how to make the most of what we have. In my years of work with families that include kids with special needs, I’ve noticed that many are single parent families. Many more struggle with finances because of the additional equipment, therapies, medications and adaptive devices that our kids need. My daughter recently had a pretty wild case of nighttime fear (that I’ll elaborate on in another post) and we rushed to the local health food store (the owner and I have become pretty great friends) to see how we could support our girl’s uptick in anxiety and poor sleep. I came home with a bag full of stuff that my son couldn’t believe I had spent xyz $$ on. My response to him was that “I would have spent 10 times that if it meant we could all get some rest.” I feel your priorities, mama. I have them too. But we still need to make our house a home. So we do – on a budget. That means a whole lot of DIYing and figuring it out as we go. I’ll share our projects, budgets, designs and even some tutorials to help you get inspired.
I want to help you celebrate the milestones. Our daughter did EVERYTHING late. We celebrated the heck out of her first steps, but they were almost a full year later than babies born around the same time as her. It was wonderful to see her make that milestone, but there was still a strange feeling about advertising that your two-year-old is finally on two feet. I want you to share in the wins here, without the weird feelings. Our kids are all on their own paths and timelines and every milestone is an important one no matter when it’s achieved. Was it strange to have to explain that my very tall 1.5 year old was crawling everywhere because she couldn’t walk yet? Sure! Is it still weird to explain to strangers that she needs help eating or putting on her shoes sometimes? Yup! And when I actually get a babysitter it’s really tough to explain that she doesn’t sleep independently, so don’t bother trying too hard to get her to go to bed. I know that she’ll come to all of that when she’s ready, regardless of what expectations people have for kids who are the same age as her physically but have far surpassed her developmentally. There will one day be a last time that I co-sleep with her. There will one day be a last time that she asks me to help her with the last few bites of dinner. And all of them will be celebrated with extreme delight (and maybe a bit of last baby sadness) as we go. I hope you’ll join us in all the wins.
I want to help you recognize, support and rock your relationship with your neurotypical kids. If there’s one thing that raising one of each has taught me, it’s that the one who needs you less can feel like they’re on the outside. Like, even if they don’t tell you they need you, that they do, they’re just not getting those needs met. That they’re trying to be a rock, because they see what you’re going through every day, but that sometimes that rock crumbles a little. That they experience the meanness of other kids at school, daycare or the community park about their sibling that is different. That they occasionally have outbursts because they’ve bottled it up for so long. That people outside your family can’t fathom why your “normal” kid might have a short fuse, because they’re not the one with special needs. Being a mama to both has helped me see how profoundly my son is affected by our family situation – I mean, how could he not be. I would love to help you see some of his warning signs, the solutions we’ve used to help him feel more connected to us and some tools that help him cope with the chaos that can be our lives at times.
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