You’ll have to excuse me for not having written a timely humorous piece on Halloween, which is in fact half-written and saved on my computer for next year’s October deadline. Instead, after having spent two long days in the hospital with our son last week, I can’t seem to let go of how unprepared parents can be for the “unexpected complications” that arise when raising a child with special needs. In thinking about this, I realized that contrary to popular belief, I did not learn all I really need to know in kindergarten.
When you have a child with special needs, there are no short distances between two points. There are curves, and angles and slopes, and it’s the upward slopes that provide you with the strength to go on.
There is no alphabetical order. There is no order. There is chaos and confusion and white noise. But in the moments there are quiet pauses, and in these pauses, is hope.
There is history, there is always history of one kind or another, and sometimes you can learn from it, and sometimes the inconsistency is mindnumbing, but there are always heroes. Sometimes they are therapists, sometimes they are family, sometimes they are the friends who accept your child for who he or she is, and sometimes, yes, sometimes, they are even school people, but always, always, always, they are your children.
There are visual learners, auditory learners, and tactile learners. Maybe our children are visual teachers, auditory teachers and tactile teachers. And maybe others need to be better educated. Maybe parts of society need an IEP and their goals should be tolerance, and openness, and acceptance. And those goals should be measured by numbers of birthday invitations a child with special needs gets in a given school year. And by the number of times a teacher makes an encouraging comment to a child struggling to achieve. And by the number of times strangers flash a comfortable smile at your child instead of an awkward or intrusive stare.
There are rules and there are exceptions to the rules. May be we need new rules. Ones that say there are no rules, that children are children and people are people and differences may be unfamiliar, but different is good.
Maybe the one thing I really need to know about raising a child with special needs that I did learn in kindergarten, is that a big box of sixty four different colors of crayons can be amazing, and boundless and completely awe inspiring, and that the world wouldn’t be half as wonderful if we didn’t have every single one of them.