Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Deciding to Start

When you plan a family, you think of all the joys of parenthood and the dreams you have for your children. When my husband and I planned to have our first child, we only prayed for a healthy child that we could share our passions with and see what the child found to be of interest. On May 14th 2000 (Mother's Day) we found ourselves in the hospital 7 1/2 weeks before our due date of July 5th, worried for the health of our daughter. We never thought that premature birth would be one of the simpler challenges we would face in the coming years.

We love our children and like all parents had ideas of what being a parent would be like. We never expected it to be easy, but we also never expected to be blessed with two children with differing challenges and gifts that add to the chaos of parenthood. See, our darling daughter was born 7 weeks early and although she survived premature birth and appeared to be developing normally, we later found after many struggles and many tests that she had sensory integration dysfunction, AD/HD and PDD-NOS, she is also very talented in art, music and general education.

When our daughter was 2 we decided to have a second child. We knew she had sensory issues, but still did not know the full extent or this may have changed our decision. We were worried mostly about prematurity while pregnant with our son. Although we had many scares of premature delivery starting at 27 weeks we held on with him and he was only 4 weeks early. Although still technically a preemie, he was rugged and 22 pounds by 6 months old. Never in our wildest dreams would we have thought he would eventually be diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Aspergers syndrome and would be highly advanced, working much higher than his grade level. We never knew how this would affect our relationship not only with each other but also with our family, friends and at times perfect strangers.

I have held in many emotions and have found that this is causing pain and frustration, making it even more difficult to handle the day-to-day struggles we have with our children. I have decided to write about what we go through each day to inform others of the pain caused by these disorders and maybe to help someone else and maybe even to help myself find hope in the pain we feel at times.

I plan to go back through the history of our family throughout the days but also want to relay current struggles to help everyone see the daily challenges we face. This is hard as many of these emotions and feelings we have kept hidden from the world. We wear our social masks like everyone else and from the outside and on a good day, we are the typical couple with the perfect family of one boy and one girl. What is behind our doors is at times sad, depressing, hurtful, scary and painful, but we try to pick up the pieces everyday and start over, praying that God will give us the strength to handle one more day.

Before I close for today, I want to make one thing clear. I love both of my children with all of my heart and we are working hard every day to try to find answers, help and healing for our children. We will always do our best to help our children, but we are human and we fall sometimes. There are days I cry for hours from the struggles and others where I am able to just deal with the situation and move on like nothing ever happened. I just hope to share what we deal with everyday and see where we go from there.