Being the parent of a child with special needs brings a particular set of challenges with it. There are the numerous doctors’ appointments, and specialists’ appointments, as well as trying to work “therapy” into everyday routines at home. Often, it seems like there isn’t enough time in the day, or the week, to get everything accomplished for my children that I’d like. This can be very frustrating, and it often makes me feel like a failure as a parent. But there is another, more insidious issue that can affect parents: the undiagnosed special need.
I was born a stutterer, from a long line of family with a variety of speech “impediments”. Talk to a group of us at a family reunion and you too, will leave as a stutterer. My father, who stutters, had the foresight to insist that I attend speech therapy sessions. Twice a week, for nine years, I slipped out of class to sit for 30 minutes in a room a little larger than a broom closet, and practiced phonetic sounds in front of a mirror.
School was a horrendous experience. Teachers were hesitant to call on me, kids would constantly laugh and tease me. My parents, as parents were back then, were very practical. They had little patience for you feeling “sorry” for yourself. My dad often told me that life was seldom fair- in fact, fair has no real definition. And my mom, always to the point, told me to learn to deal with the cards I was dealt.
