Autism Awareness Day 19 - Putting aside our adult agendas. Yes I'm still behind on these posts but it's important to me so I will continue on. Hopefully you all aren't sick of them and hopefully some of you are actually benefiting from my posts. So now lets get back to the topic of putting aside our adult agendas.
As an adult you have a lot of responsibilities, expectations, plans, etc but when you have a child with special needs you will find that sometimes it all goes out the window. Some days run smoothly and I get things accomplished that I had planned to but other days just don't work that way. Before the diagnosis of Autism I thought I must be some kind of awful parent who just couldn't get her children to do what they should. A parent who was incapable of getting things done that should be done. I was so frustrated, I was trying so hard to get my boys to do the things they "should" and to manage my household and my photography business the way I "should" but nothing was working right. Why were other Moms and other photographer Mom's able to get things done and I wasn't? Why was I failing so miserably??
Then I finally started realizing that Gatlin just wasn't a typical child, then came his diagnosis and soon after the realization that Draiman wasn't a typical child either. My boys have Autism, therefore they have special needs which means that the things that work for other parents don't always work for us. I finally started to see that things were just going to be different for us and that different is ok. It's perfectly ok that my children haven't met their milestones in the same timeline as someone else's child. It's perfectly ok that our household, our lives, are not the same as some other families. It is perfectly ok that I that I focus more on what my children need and less on what I thought I "should" be doing.
One of my favorite movies that we've watched dealing with Autism is called The Horse Boy. There were so many ways in which I could relate to this family, so many things they learned that we also learned along the way. The journey was crazy and amazing at the same time. My favorite parts of the movie are when Rowan's Dad talks about needing to put our adult agendas aside and do what's best for our children and when he says his prayer for his son and everyone affected by Autism. It was a powerful movie and he makes some powerful points. Sometimes we really do need to put our adult agendas aside, and I believe this goes for special needs parents as well as typical parents.
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