It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to write a blog post. Every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t. I had no new ideas. Nothing new to share with you. I called it writer’s block. But really, it’s not that I couldn’t write. It’s that I felt like my voice didn’t really matter anymore, so the words I wanted to say felt pointless to type.
I currently live in a weird no-man’s land between the typical special needs life and just the plain old typical life. I have three sons and one has autism. But he’s verbal. He was mainstreamed in school. He has friends and has won medals in a sport. A lot of people tell me they wouldn’t know he’s autistic just to look at him. But what they don’t realize is that he used to be nonverbal. He used to be self-injurious. He used to “look” more autistic (if that’s really a thing). We used to wonder if he’d ever tell us he loves us.
There are a lot of used tos in our book now.
And because of all these used tos, it left me feeling like I didn’t have any reason to speak hope into the lives of other parents who are still asking all those will he ever questions. A lot of our questions have been answered. But do you really want to hear about it? I feared you wouldn’t.
We don’t quite fit in the world of severe special needs. We don’t fit in the world with parents whose children are completely nonverbal, who are entrenched in 40 hours a week of therapy, and the same number of hours spent talking to insurance to convince them they need to cover those hours like they said they would. We don’t live in the land of having a helmet on hand in case our child starts banging his head against the wall. We don’t have to worry (too much) about our child being destructive in our home in the midst of a meltdown. We don’t even have to worry about going to a Mexican restaurant anymore because he now eats the chicken tenders practically every restaurant has on the kid’s menu (though we do still have the argument of why he has to order off the kid’s menu as a 13yr old when that’s the only way he can order what he wants).
Source: Special Needs Parenting- Key Ministry
