It’s been nearly three years since I last posted, and almost as long since I’ve written anything other than a Facebook status. Where have we been? What have we been doing? Where do we go from here?
There was certainly a lot of life’s smaller details – the grocery lists, the school stuff, a surprise pregnancy and a third child brought into the family. I would often sit down to my laptop with a faint desire to write something down only to be distracted by something a little more pressing, or to type out a few words only to find I was never quite sure what to say.
It’s not that nothing of note happened (hello, whole additional child!), it’s that I frequently questioned how much to share about my life and Rowenna’s. Where’s the line between sharing what a proud parent naturally shares and violating her privacy? What about new parents looking for an idea of what might wait down the road? Where did my near daily urge to write something, anything go? I keenly remember longing for blogs written by parents of older kids, wondering what happened at about age 5 when even the most prolific bloggers simply…faded away.
And now I know. The need to explain and justify slowly fades with time. The need to get your opinion out there doesn’t urge you to put words to paper quite as often. The issues of the day matter, and they’re pressing, but your own opinion about them doesn’t feel so important.
And real truth be told – life just gets sort of boring. You transition from Early Intervention to school of some kind and you settle into a pattern you’ll follow for at least 15 years. What to say of an IEP process I’ve now experienced a half dozen times, primarily for the best? I don’t have any secret tricks or tips because I now know the deeply frustrating truth: so much of how our children experience school is dependent on the individuals at the table. Not policy, state or district or otherwise. Not how hard you’ve fought as a parent. So much comes down to the willingness of the team to both craft a good IEP and then implement it. We all experience various shades of luck when it comes to that.
During all this wondering and waiting for words to come, Rowenna somehow went and turned 9. She’ll start third grade in the fall. It’s so true what they say about parenting, that the days are long but the years are short. Just yesterday she was my joyful little toddler, motoring around on unsure feet. Now, she spends the majority of her day in general education where she is warmly embraced by her classmates. I’ve seen it in action, both at school and while we’re out in the community. How did I “make it happen”? Partly by intentionally building a team at her school building that involves all aspects of her school day, from school secretary to the music teacher to her classroom teacher. Partly by having shear luck in who sits at our table to make decisions. We make trade offs to keep her in a general education setting, but that’s a blog post for a different time. And no, we don’t keep her there because we are “supposed to.” It’s right for her, despite some of the drawbacks.
We struggle with the side effects of not using verbal communication. Her “talker” helps quite a bit, but it isn’t very nuanced. We see more and more each day how her wants and needs outpace what she can effectively communicate.
She’s still so wonderfully Ro: kind, gentle, clever, persistent. As her abilities change and her world broadens, she never loses that core of self. Her love for her sisters is evident every day in the gentle way she herds them together and the head pats they receive. She still loves to be outside, to listen to music and dance. Ro in a happy place is all of us in a happy place, such is the joy she simply radiates.
I’ve never been sure where this blog is going, and I’m even less sure now after a nearly 3 year hiatus. If you’re willing to come along with me while I figure it out, I’m happy to have you here. I anticipate some musings on parenthood and probably on disability in general. I’m hoping to return to sharing some of my favorite stories of all three of my girls. We’ll see what shape this all takes.
But for now, I’ll stretch and warm back up and see which words float to the top. Thanks for sticking around.
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