A Hero or Just a Parent?
During the discussion here last week about the challenges of parenting a disabled child (“Is It Harder to Have a Child with Down Syndrome?”), I heard from Stacie Lewis. An American living in London, Lewis has an 18-month-old daughter named May, who has severe brain damage, caused by lack of oxygen at birth.
Lewis has been blogging about May since the baby was 4 months old, at Mama Lewis and the Amazing Adventures of the Half-Brained Baby. Often her readers leave comments praising her courage and patience — the same kind of comments that many (though hardly all) Motherlode readers left on the Down syndrome post.
Those sort of comments tick Lewis off. She is not some kind of hero, she says, just a mother who drew an unexpectedly complicated hand. And, as she writes in a guest post today, sometimes she gets more than cranky about it.
Read more here: A Hero or Just a Parent? – NYTimes.com.
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About The Author
Julia Roberts
Julia Roberts is founder of Support for Special Needs and has been a regular contributor since its inception in May 2010. A mom to two kids with special needs, she didn't want other parents to feel what is the often isolating world of raising a child (or two!) with disabilities. Her kids had kidney transplants at the age of eight and will need liver transplants in the future as a result of ARPKD/CHF. They both have vision disorders and learning disabilities.
Just a parent, true, and someone that drew a particularly unfortunate hand, sure, I’ll say that’s true as well. I’d wager that most of us here are those with children dealt a bad hand by life, fate, genetics, or what-have-you.
But if you look at it from the other side, those normy parents can’t imagine doing the things we have to do on a daily basis – trach care, suctioning, g-tube care and feeds, resuscitation, ventilator troubleshooting – I mean, the list goes on. To them, we ARE heroes. To them, we ARE going above and beyond the call of plain ol’ parenting.
Why not take it with a grain of salt and just a little more grace?
My two cents.