Leadership and growth

Wonder
Photo by Emily Morter
Co-production and advocacy / Disability / Improving healthcare / Leadership and growth / My toolkit / Special Needs Parenting

Wonder

I think sometimes we special needs parents are getting the wrong message. We're told that if we want to be effective, we should be the mama bear — fierce and protective. Or the victim, sad and pleading. The course leader's parable reminded me that I have other options, ones that actually might be more effective than anger or sadness.

8 Comments
December 9, 2013
Mind the Gap
Disability / Leadership and growth / Special Needs Parenting

Mind the Gap

On one side is you -- with your skills, your strengths, your resilience, your smarts, your capacity. On the other side is what life throws at you -- work, relationship needs, illness, a bad economy, whatever. The distance (actual or perceived) between what you can do and what life needs you to do is the Gap.

1 Comment
August 9, 2013
Greetings from the other side
Photo by Jean Gerber
Leadership and growth / Special Needs Parenting

Greetings from the other side

We arrived in Sweden to festive pomp and circumstance after disembarking our ship in England and hopping a short flight to Stockholm. Flags, streamers, champagne, hugs, dinner in the garden, even the cherry tree blooming on cue for our arrival...it was a reception in the truest sense of the word.

4 Comments
May 20, 2013
Spending some time at the Threshold
Leadership and growth / Special Needs Parenting

Spending some time at the Threshold

When my husband and I moved our family from Boston to Stockholm last week, we decided to kick the whole she-bang up a notch by getting ourselves to Europe by boat on the Queen Mary 2. A week-long break between the stress of saying good-bye and hello appealed to us both. As the granddaughter of immigrants who had made their way to Ellis Island decades ago by sea, there was the romantic symmetry of returning to Europe on a boat for me as well.

10 Comments
May 11, 2013
Prostration
Photo by Mateus Campos
Co-production and advocacy / Disability / Leadership and growth / My toolkit / Special Needs Parenting

Prostration

Several years ago I heard a radio interview with a devout Jewish woman who had a practice of laying prostrate—face down on the ground, arms outstretched. She said she did it to remind herself that she was not in control of every little thing. She was in God’s hands. In other faiths too, the act of laying oneself down is one of humility or surrender. While I might not share the beliefs from which this tradition springs, I do appreciate the value of acknowledging that I am not always in control.

4 Comments
April 4, 2013
Special needs eclipse
Leadership and growth / My toolkit / Special Needs Parenting

Special needs eclipse

I can't even capture the intensity of the dark feeling now, but it was there, even though the circumstances seem trivial now. In one flash I saw myself forty years from now tying his shoe laces, wiping his mouth and his bottom, and my mind did a high-speed rewind through all of the thousands of tying and wiping moments I'd have between then and now. Zero to despair and rage in sixty seconds. It was hot and black and tight.

13 Comments
March 18, 2013
Water, water everywhere
kneedeepstudio.blogspot.com
Disability / Leadership and growth / Special Needs Parenting

Water, water everywhere

I'm getting used to this ambiguity. Often special needs parenting (and living in general, as you all insightfully point out) is about learning to thrive in that in-between feeling—being clear about what you want, having faith that you'll get there, but not being attached to getting there. It's like floating. I let go of the shore, on my back looking up at the sky, not getting too caught up going in any particular direction, occasionally paddling my feet to steer me in the generally right way, but not so much that I get a cramp. Just being. Just floating. Just appreciating being wet.

6 Comments
December 14, 2012
Close Menu