WAH in MLC with PA

[DiamondGirl]

I'm posting some of the passages from the book I just finished because maybe someone else will find them helpful and they may help explain my lightbulb moment today...

"When you tell people you don't like yourself, they just scrunch their face and say things like "How can you not love yourself?" Or they say, "I don't understand that because I really love myself." But then you look at them and you know it's not true. They hate themselves too. They just don't know it.

It used to bother me why some people had to go through so much pain in life and be so aware of it, and other people were just happy to go bowling," she said, almost as an afterthought. "For a long time, I thought maybe we were being punished for something. But now, it doesn't bother me anymore."

"Why?" I asked.

"I don't think people who have a lot of pain are being punished," she said. "I believe they're the chosen ones."

(Pg. 80-81, Melody Beattie's "Stop Being Mean to Yourself", a conversation with her daughter)


It hit me when I read this passage in her book, that there were many things in my life that had prepared me for where I am now. Too many to list but one stands out crystal clear:

As a teen, I impulsively volunteered for a few special needs summer camps and worked with a series of boys with Autism, with their ages ranging from 4 to 18. The only reason I did was because my friend had to as a punishment for something (community service) and begged me to and I was bored. In doing that, I was more attuned when I saw the signs in my son who was less than 2 years old, much earlier than most parents notice things who haven't been around Autistics.

Also, throughout my M, I had to compensate for H's lack of financial restraint and budget on one income for our family. I became quite good at stretching money wafer thin. Now I find myself going back to those skills I learned today to keep things going for my family. Without that prior experience, I wouldn't have been able to switch gears so quickly back to that way of budgeting.

I always believed that special needs kids were given to those who could best give them the life they deserved to have. Whether or not it worked out that way was up to the one given the gift of that child.

More than that though, I've stepped back and realized that I have been given two children, one verbal and one not. Two perspectives in one family. Two different ways of raising children as the interactions are completely opposite. With one you use gestures, pictures and words, and the other the need for those is diminished.

Why were those two children given to a writer? To a woman who has even more profound emotional and psychological disabilities that were inherited, but are easier to overcome than a neurological one...

Because it is only someone strong enough to overcome her own deep disabilities that would be strong enough to raise, nurture, and protect two opposite children such as mine. So that's the answer to "Why me?". Something I've been asking on and off for years in times of hardship...

And as for them being given to a writer, perhaps just for today.. or maybe for a future book or other means of sharing what I learn along the way...

(continued...)