I was helping a mother who wanted to stop advocating for her special needs toddler. If you are the parent of a special education or special needs child, here are some words for you:
I wanted to write and provide some encouragement. The definition of encouragement, according to the dictionary, is: "1. to give somebody hope, confidence, or courage; 2. to urge somebody in a helpfull way to be or do something; 3. to assist something to occur or increase."
You might be in the special education pit right now but you are going to have to do advocacy for the rest of your child's educational life, lest your child's fate be given over to the whims of impersonal bureaucrats, working in a flawed system, who make decisions based on budgetary concerns over individual needs and life chances. I know how hard this advocacy is. I was once unable to take on the IEP team and didn't even know I needed to for years. Luckily, I realized the need to advocate for my son by his third grade year. If I would have known then what I know now, I would have started when my son was in kindergarten. The sooner I could have started, the better the results.
I know that advocacy doesn't fit in with the demands of single parenthood and school demands. I was a low-income single parent going to the university full time and on welfare. I didn't want to do advocacy. The only reason I did it was because my conscience wouldn't allow me to put school and my economic situation before my son's needs. I cried for months when I first took on the advocacy and didn't have any help. Every other challenge in my life has paled in comparison to the special education advocacy for my son when I was alone, in school, dealing with his behaviors plus the stupid school's continual badgering and poverty of those early years.
All I can say is that doing the thing that I hated most and was hardest has produced the most fruit in my life and given me such joy in my heart. The joy goes so deep and is so sweet. I cannot purchase the inner reward I got, and continually get when I see my son succeeding, from taking on the school. The horrid thing then has become today's joy and satisfaction. It's like sewing and reaping. I sewed into my son and now I'm reaping the reward. It took a long time to get the rewards. But, the rewards come and come, in waves.
Your child will become an adult someday. What you do now has the power to change the person your child will become, for the better. All you see is the toddler. I see the adult because I'm watching my litttle boy become a man and see how fast the child grows. I see how fast the time goes by and how those opportunities to change a poor fate quickly appear and dissappear. You have an opportunity now.
It is hard; it is even the hardest thing a woman has to do in the best of all economic and family circumstances. If you choose to do this thing called advocacy, you will not be sorry. What makes you sick today will make you well in the future and it will be good for your heart, your soul, your character as a strong woman, your body, and your child's life. You have the power to give him the gift of advocacy to your child. This is a powerful gift.
