Excerpts

Excerpt from Chapter 1 – Getting the Most Out of Life

This book isn’t just about “coping with” or “adapting to” the heavier parenting demands that have been placed on you as the mother of a child with special needs. This book is about helping you thrive, be happy, and carve out a fulfilling life for yourself.

If you’re life most of us, when you became a mom you temporarily set aside some of your own plans for pursuing a career, hobbies, or other interests. There are, after all, only so many hours in a day. While fathers and other family members make sacrifices too, research shows that it’s the moms who bear the brunt of caring for children with special needs. Your plans to climb the corporate ladder, finish your degree, learn photography, or make your first quilt can easily fall by the wayside, even as your children grow older.

In families with typically developing kids, this parenting intensity often diminishes over time. Children grow up and become more independent, allowing their mothers more freedom to pursue other activities. While this process may be delayed or stalled for years for mothers of children with special needs, eventually, each of us needs to reclaim lost dreams or embrace new ones. Whether it’s work hobbies, or community involvement, everyone needs an interest to call their own.

Your child may be the most important thing in your life – but you can’t let her be the only important thing. When your child’s needs are overwhelming, it’s easy to let parenting become all-consuming. Kayla discovered that the year her adult daughter with Rett syndrome moved into a group home. “It hit me in the face when Lesley left – I had become an empty shell.”

Maybe having your child leave home seems like a far-off dream. But every one of us needs a strong sense of self in order to feel competent and stave off depression. Otherwise, you wind up like Jane, the stay-at-home mother of a young child with a developmental disability and severe behavior problems, who’s had little time to explore her own interests and strengths in recent years. She told us, “I feel like I’ve lost my confidence – I look back at the essays I wrote in University and wonder what happened to that person.”

That doesn’t have to happen. Even when parenting demands are intense, you can keep you own dreams alive. Or, if those old dreams have withered, you can revive them. But they may look different this time around.

If your child was recently diagnosed, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. If you’ve been dealing with special needs issues for a long time, you may feel you haven’t had the luxury to consider your own hopes and ambitions. But sometimes, as your life changes to accommodate your child’s needs, you’ll find that your goals and dreams change as well. It’s time to take a look at how your daily life fits with what’s important to you now. This chapter will help you start to think about yourself – what you value, appreciate, or want to change – in order to live your life to the fullest.