A New Reality

It should have been more momentous. Sitting there, in a classroom last week, listening to my autistic son’s teacher tell me that he was doing well in all his subjects was the stuff of my dreams a few years ago.  A reality I couldn’t imagine, but one I hoped to attain in the far away [...]

Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back

“You need to come to the school and pick him up,” said the voice of my son’s special education teacher on the phone. We’d been riding a positive wave of good news as far as Michael had been concerned.  His last conference had brought me to tears; he was working on grade level, in the [...]

The Difference of a Year

“We have a pool,”  the mother of one of Melinda’s friends said to me over the phone.  ”Would you like to bring the kids over this afternoon?” Her name was Sue, and she’d been the room mother of my daughter’s kindergarten classroom this year.  I’d volunteered in the library and reading to the kids once [...]

Playing the Game

I cornered Michael’s afternoon teacher at the end of the day.  Normally he came home on a special bus, the “short bus” as it was commonly known.  A bus that I’d sometimes had to belt him into, kicking and screaming as traffic backed up behind its red lights.  But today I was picking Michael up, [...]

Never Normal

It was time for our monthly meeting at Michael’s preschool.   To keep tabs on Michael’s progress, his school scheduled family meetings once a month to update the parents on the progress of their special needs child.  It was at these meetings that they would make suggestions about what could be done at home, if [...]

Dramarama

It was late.  I was sitting at my computer desk in the kitchen, listening to the quiet of the house, wondering when I’d be done.   There were three days left before the Rick Springfield HDNet special in Illinois, and I had a million things to do. The pressure was on, and none of the [...]

A New World

I looked around the classroom, slowly, holding Michael’s hand.  It looked a great deal like your standard issue preschool classroom:   letter block foam play area, bins of toys tucked neatly into cubbies, perfectly penned nametags pasted to the wall near coat hooks.  R stood silently next to me, his face unreadable. “Look, Michael,” I [...]

Special Education

“Do you have the paperwork?” asked the school psychologist, one of five people assembled around the table. Before we’d moved, the Help Me Grow people in Ohio had told me that there was a federal law governing special needs children.  It didn’t matter where we lived, if a child was identified by the “Birth to [...]