Parenting a Special Needs Child in a Pandemic
(picture from the article below)
In an article in Human Parts called "Special Needs Parenting in the Age of Pandemic" by Sean Patrick Hughes, a US Naval serviceman, who endured many hardships through deployments for our country, and a father of a special needs son speaks candidly about his experiences in the Navy and of raising a son with autism through this pandemic. He provides some great insights on how to make it day to day through what might seem like the hardest time in life.
He says:
"While the journey of a thousand miles starts with just one step, the journey of a long, hardcore, truly tough experience starts with a step of a different sort. That of acknowledging your reality. Owning it. Making it a part of you. Wearing it, as Tyrion Lannister says, like a cloak that protects you against the fragile and meaningless luxuries of another time.
Once you get there, you’re free to move on to three valuable thoughts that can get you through just about anything.
1. Every moment is just a moment. Every day is just a day. You can only live them one at a time. If you look at all the troubles you are about to encounter in any long and difficult endeavor and stack them up on top of you at once, you will collapse. The burden is too heavy.
See every moment for what it is. One moment. It begins. It ends. Don’t overvalue its joy or its hardship. Don’t project any reality as representative of some permanent future. As soon as you do, you’ve let water seep into the crack. When the real hard winter comes, it will freeze and split your world wide open. That’s when you quit. Except you can’t quit what you can’t quit. And all there is from there is suffering.
2. Be grateful. It doesn’t matter what you are going through. Gratitude applies. If you can’t think of anything, then spend some time with the miracle that is existence.
Grab the dirt beneath your feet. Breathe the air around you. Catch the light that shines off of everything you see. Realize the infinite space and time it all had to travel to be here for you to experience. Realize the millions of ways the matter that is you could have been organized for you not to exist.
Entropy is the natural order of the universe. Celebrate the forces that stave it off to create the cosmically unlikely event that is existence. If you spend some time with that thought, you’re ready to celebrate the unlikely miracle that is your existence. And you can’t help but feel gratitude.
3. See yourself in the service of caring for your child. It’s not a long list of tedious things you shouldn’t have to deal with. It’s an opportunity to serve your child.
We weren’t sitting in the bush in Africa getting our" (butts) "handed to us by physics and nature. We were serving the American people. And if you don’t think that serving your special needs child is as honorable as military service, you’ve read one too many Navy SEAL books. Those guys would tell you the same. Trust me, I know them all.
I’ve cleaned more crappers and written more admin reports than I’ve gone on combat patrols by a factor of 100. That was service, too. Through the lens of service, the tedious becomes honorable. Let that all sink in for a second. Then let’s bring it back to now.
We’re early on in this crisis. None of us know how long we’ll be here. Special needs parents are looking up at a mountain that’s higher than everyone else. For those of you with just good old fashioned standard-issue kids, all of this applies too, because lord knows eight weeks of lockdown with them isn’t easy either.
Keep these thoughts in the front of your mind. Pray them if that’s your thing. I do — it works. When your world gets small and tough and you’ve come to the conclusion there’s no way out of what’s coming, remind yourself:
- Take it one day at a time.
- Be grateful.
- Serve others.
That’s it. That’s all there is. Anything else is a sales pitch. Now go forward and do hard things."
To read more from his article, check out the link below.
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