A parent I met through my blog, Angi, mom to Elizabeth Ann, mentioned an expert named Ken Moses the other day on a post I did about getting past grief. He’s a psychologist and speaker who helps people deal with trauma, crisis and loss, and father to a child with cerebral palsy. I Googled him and found a powerful article he’d written on parenting a kid with disabilities. One graph that really touched me:
“Parents attach to children through core-level dreams, fantasies, illusions, and projections into the future. Disability dashes these cherished dreams. The impairment, not the child, irreversibly spoils a parent’s fundamental. heart-felt yearning. Disability shatters the dreams, fantasies, illusions, and projections into the future that parents generate as part of their struggle to accomplish basic life missions. Parents of impaired children grieve for the loss of dreams that are key to the meaning of their existence, to their sense of being. Recovering from such a loss depends on one’s ability to separate from the lost dream, and to generate new, more attainable, dreams.”
This is so, so true. Part of the acceptance of having a child with special needs means realizing that many of the visions you had for your child, or life with your child, aren’t going to materialize. It’s an extremely difficult thing to accept, especially as you see children and parents all around you proceeding with their lives, while you are suddenly navigating a very different, sometimes treacherous one.
I found this acceptance virtually impossible in the first two years after Max was born. It came slowly. Painfully, tear-jerkingly slowly. Many days I was never able to see a possible future because all I could see was the dark swirl of delays looming in front of me.
But acceptance arrived, coaxed along by my pride in Max’s progress, my fierce love for him and my determination to do whatever I could to help him.
And suddenly, I was able to build new hopes and dreams for him.
And not only do I accept them, I am content with them.
Ellen blogs daily at To The Max
Photo by Nicholas Valentin