I had one job. To get my grandchildren to school on time this morning. The careful list of instructions left by my daughter spelled it out clearly.

“Leave the house by 7:15 am.”

I am clever. I remember the ordeal a simple task of loading the car can be. We stepped out the door at 7 am sharp with the idea fifteen minutes to load would be ample. Silly me. It’s been too long. I should have started at 3 am.

The Boston Terrier escaped when the door opened, which was no big deal because she self-potties and runs back to the door. Unless there is a raccoon in the yard. She took off like a bat out of hell and disappeared into the woods.

First the children went in hot pursuit— but to no avail. They were impressed how their skittish dog penetrated the forest with no reserve. Then it was my turn. Into the woods I went.

Looking up, I spotted Olive’s obsession in the branch over my head. Leash in hand, eventually I corralled our domesticated crazed beast and coaxed her out of the brush and back into civilization. Enough adventure for one day— these kids must get to school!

Buckled back in, I press the ignition.

“Key fob not found.”

I am holding the fob in my hand. This is a push button ignition. Ugh!!! Ok, there is an emergency manual key hidden in every fob — I extract it and look for the insertion slot.

Dashboard. No. Under the cup holder. No. In the storage bay. No. Dash again. No. By my knees. No. Ugh!!! My grandson Brave mentions the penalties levied against him for arriving late.

Ugh.

Quick thinking, my beloved searches google “Mazda Fob Reset” and gets the vehicle to respond to the fob. Off we go! Thank you, Grandpa!

I do not know my way around Nashville. But I am quick with my GPS and equipped with the address pre-loaded. Only upon arriving at the first spaghetti junction, the options the program presented me did not match the road signs. Each road may have 4 names, but only a local can supply the names not present on the sign overhead. And I am no local.

Pulling off in heavy traffic, I switch programs and the alternate app chooses a route actually represented by signage. How was I to know it was a fifteen minute diversion to make a loop back around? And loop we did.

I prayed for a miracle- a teleportation wonder where somehow we pull into car line right on time. That miracle did not happen. My grandchildren were late to school this morning, my first day behind the wheel of their parenting, entrusted with their precious lives.

But a miracle had taken place, over a number of years actually. The miracle of being able to remain calm under pressure, the miracle of not accepting the shame offered me after failure. The miracle of seeing the humor in circumstances real time, even when the outcome feels like it makes me look bad. The miracle of being present and loving life and being connected to the God of the universe who is smiling at me as I navigate loving well in the midst of stress.
​
Rescue comes in the form of a Person— through Divine camaraderie and empowerment. Today, in the midst of your own story, receive His provision and watch the same miracles unfold.

Our children grow up and carry with them the scars from the words spoken over them. No matter how mindful we are of this, how carefully we choose our words, our soon-to-be adult children will still need Jesus, His perspective and His healing balm for restoration. Even so, we do need to be oh so mindful! 

As parents of children with hidden disabilities, or really as parents of any child, we are not parenting behaviors— we are shepherding little hearts. Empathy and compassion come before correction and instruction. Even now, my 28-year-old is helping me to understand the impact of my own words on her, words I felt at the time needed to be spoken, but words that could have been spoken after recognition and acknowledgment of her very valid feelings. Her inability to process or choose appropriate behaviors at the time did not invalidate her feelings as a child! 

Today a friend mentioned needing to house a family member for a season to relieve his parents from incessant triggering. There can be constant volatility when a teen is struggling with ADHD and perhaps other undiagnosed co-morbidities. The messaging behind “getting him out of the house” will need to be conveyed carefully.

​Just like a gifted photographer gets to choose to focus on the petals of the wildflower rather than on the necessary drainage ditch three feet away, as parents we get to choose where we direct attention. We can highlight what is true in ways our children see their value, despite the challenges they face. 

This boy has needs. His needs can be better accommodated for a season with fewer people around. The reprieve offers more space for his parents to pursue a better understanding of how he can be best accommodated for his future success. The message our children need to hear the loudest trumpets their value, whether as our babies or as the children of God.​

I am a lover of beauty.

For those of you on my private Facebook feed, you know this from the kind of photos I post. I cherish visual beauty. I cherish experiential beauty. I cherish relational beauty. Even the activities I engage in are in pursuit of beauty...hiking deep within the forest, skiing mountains to gaze over the Continental Divide, scuba diving. It’s all so glorious! 

I’ve created art myself, and my favorite pieces feel sacred because they are in expression of the unseen me. God as the infinite Creator invites me into deeper experience of Him through His weave of Self expression into finite materialization, experienceable wonder.

I look for beauty, watch for beauty, convinced it’s there, waiting to be noticed. Our retired Air Force colonial friend who took up photography understands this about our world. A scene worth enlarging onto canvas and immortalizing upon the wall, he commented once about how he can zoom in, frame and capture stilt legged fowl standing majestically among water logged reeds. On the side of the road. By a drainage ditch. Three feet away from a soggy discarded shirt, faded red coke can and a Dasani bottle.

​Beauty. It’s there. Can you see it? 

Likewise it’s there in people. Created by God, in His image, crafted by His hand. Breathtakingly beautiful.

​Look past the brokenness, the carnage left on the scene by self and by others, and “frame” on the Creator’s intent. Breathe it in. Speak it out. Show it to others. Celebrate it. Fearfully and wonderfully made. Precious in His sight.

Our children. His children. Mankind. Humanity. Beauty.

Innocently, my friend who successfully raised wonderful neuro-typical children posted a picture on Facebook of a wide leather belt with the words emblazoned across the photo, "The original ADHD medicine". The obvious implication is that good ole discipline will "cure" all that ails the ADHD child. The joke hit me as being about as funny as racist humor. It just isn't. Period. Ever. 

We know what it feels like to be “that” family.

For families who are raising children with authentic neuro-psychiatric differences, judgment is cast upon both the child and parents ad nauseam. The children are "misbehaving brats" and the assumption is that either: 

• Parents are too undisciplined and create mirror image children... 

or

• Parents are too ignorant to provide an acceptable level of accountability or training for their children.

Families raising children with hidden disabilities deal with the added challenges of child rearing AND the unrighteous judgments made against them. Judgment isolates families and undermines every ounce of support a typical family may enjoy facing normal parenting hardships. The net result is that families who actually need the most understanding and support, actually receive the least. 

For the countless re-posters of the Internet meme, don't think for a minute that such "humor" made at the expense of struggling families is throwing Big Pharma under the bus. Big Pharma is not listening. But someone is listening. All the families who are in your sphere who are dealing with neurology issues in their own homes are listening. And your message produces bad fruit. 

For the parent who is still ignorant of the reality of neurology’s impact on behavior and self control in their children, judgment may compel them to exert even more ineffectual pressure on their misbehaving child in the form of harsher and hasher discipline culminating in abuse. Discipline will never cure neurology.

For the parent who is aware that the challenges they face are resultant from a hidden disability, judgment through insensitive jesting may hurt and isolate them further. 

I fail to see the humor in either of these outcomes. 

Create for yourself an imaginary godly audience who watches your interactions, and who wants only the best for you. I’m not proposing a galley of condemning stone throwers, rather, the voices of wisdom who speak into your life encouragingly. We are our own reality show before a great cloud of witnesses!

One day, those babies will be grown and able to process through not only their own behaviors, but also yours. Keep your behaviors pointing to a loving, grace filled God who also remains committed to standards of right and wrong. He is standing by to be your ever present help in time of need! ​

I serve a God who heals. Some of my friends are the kind of people who travel internationally to proclaim God's word and experience first hand miraculous signs and wonders, dramatic healings that defy science and glorify God. I know God heals, yet my child who has now reached adulthood is still at home, struggling with anxiety and depression to the point of being disabled in some seasons. Yet she is a delight to my heart, and a huge help to me at home. We press in for healing, utilizing medical intervention as well as prayer, but in the meantime we trust God is good, all the time. He walks us through the valley of the shadow of death, not around it. 

We miss the passage in Hebrews about the heroes of faith that says some women received their loved ones back, while others were sawed in two! Granted, the context of the passage refers to persecution for faith, but the truth can be generalized. Those families cried out for deliverance too, just like me. There are those crying out to God for an outcome as good as mine. There are those crying out to God for an outcome as good as yours. Perspective is everything. In the midst of our most drama filled years, I would call my friend who adopted a sibling group of four with their propensities toward addictions, counseling needs and brain chemistry challenges. I used to tell her I called her to gain perspective, but that she needed to call a Thai tsunami victim to do the same! No matter what our battle, He is there to walk each of us through. One thing I know, neither life nor death, rage attacks, humiliations, incarcerations, surgeries, or school expulsions can separate us from the love of God.

Psalm 23:4, Hebrews 11:35-40, Romans 8:38-39

Toppling the Idol of Ideal
Raising Children with Special Needs

The stats are changing. It’s no longer just the rare family who has the autistic child we read about in some magazine article or see on television. Behavioral issues in our children have catapulted out of the realm of child raising and psychology and into the realm of neurobiology and psychiatry. Whether resultant from neurotoxins in the environment, dietary criminals or some other etiology, more and more families are receiving diagnoses of ADHD, autism, or other legitimate neuro-psychiatric disorders.

Is the church late in constructive response? We may be unintentionally too quick to offer counseling or deliverance with no real grasp that neurology is not necessarily a spiritual problem and definitely not a parenting problem; it’s brain chemistry. This leaves Christian Moms and Dads potentially susceptible to the myriad of uninformed voices, voices that decry the pharmaceutical industry as evil drug pushers for profit, and voices blaming lack of quality parenting for most if not all behavioral challenges. 

It’s not sympathy that’s needed, but rather hearing from somebody who “gets it”, somebody who can discuss practical issues like fighting despair, judgment, and educational challenges, deciding about medications, labeling our children, IEP’s and 504 behavior plans. Perhaps most importantly, what is needed is not only assurance that our children will be alright, but that we will survive intact spiritually while grappling with why me, why us, and why my baby? If you are that parent, You will enter into a new season, a season of discovery that launches you from a battle-weary position dodging the fiery darts of the enemy, to a position of protection reclining in the strong tower of God’s abiding presence. 

When my son was in the first grade, his classmates were mostly accepting and his teacher understanding. Yet my son’s vocal and motor tics caused him to find ways to compensate. What does even a young adult do to compensate when accidentally making an aberrant noise in a room full of peers? Some blush, some wish they could go hide in a hole, while others make light by offering a joke about barking spiders or feigning their neighbor’s guilt. I think one has to be at least thirty before possessing the poise and grace to just say “Excuse me” without a second thought! And that’s for just one infraction, not infractions that happen repeatedly, every single day of their lives. 

My son’s school psychologist came to observe in the classroom and witnessed clowning behaviors. The psychologist’s assessment included the judgment that my son was an attention seeker. Really? Exactly the opposite was the truth. Comic behaviors in the midst of tics are to conceal the tics, because the more controlled gross and fine motor movements become for an aging child, the more obvious unwanted movements become. And what’s worse, sometimes the tics themselves can be humiliating. For a painfully prolonged several weeks, my son had a complex motor tic slamming his fist into his groin in a knock out punch. He neither enjoyed this or thought it was funny. He was mortified, humiliated and in pain. He could blush, go hide in a hole, or make light of it, all the while dying a thousand deaths as a school psychologist further assassinates intentions labeling my son as attention seeking. 

These mischaracterizations tempt us as parents to go Mama Bear on our children’s overseers. A level head with aim for advocacy is wiser. I pretend that we are all on the same team, and all believe in my son as much as I do. Visualization is a powerful tool. Loyalties are created through offering grace when communicating how observers are getting it all wrong, terribly wrong, by using face saving heedfulness. There are times this takes as much self discipline as we used when our obstetrician told us “Don’t push!” and we wanted HIM to die a thousand deaths. This is our battle to fight, and when battle lines are drawn, the more warriors you retain on your side of the chalk line, the better. 

First pediatrician: Our pediatrician fancied himself capable of diagnosing and treating brain chemistry. He prescribed my preschooler Adderall for ADHD symptoms. On this medication, she body slammed a plate glass window in a fit of rage because she could not choose between two pencils in a cavern gift shop. We were accustomed to her rages, but there was something characteristically different as she sustained a five hour tantrum (much to the amusement of the guards) on the floor of the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. My call to her doctor yielded instructions to double her medication. I fired him instead. He later abandoned his wife, children and medical practice, running off with a Russian pen pal.  

At a loss and completely ignorant, my husband and I began to devour literature on ADHD. Our wonderfully brilliant child could barely function! When tested for Kindergarten readiness, I was told my precious baby, already reading fluently and casually doing division in her head, cried, disengaged, and curled up in a ball “acting autistic”. Rather than gaining admittance into the private school of our choice, my daughter received a psychiatric referral! Without a clean bill of health, our child was unwelcome.

First psychologist: He was Jewish, which was funny considering what happened next: my child chose to draw for him the Christian plan of salvation with satan basking in the burning flames of hell, complete with the cross of Christ bridging the gap between earth and God’s throne in heaven, illustrating the substitutionary redemptive death of the Messiah. He asked us how long we had been sexually molesting her. (????) That wasn’t a very positive first visit. We were not devastated; we were rightly outraged. He did not bother to get to know us to determine our character. Instead, he determined that the structure we put in place after reading on ADHD was actually the causative agent for our daughter’s maladies. She received the coveted “clean bill of health”. Life proved differently.

I am happy to report that after these misadventures, we actually received valuable help. My point however, is this: TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS. Get educated, eyeing preconceived ideas, even your own, with suspicion. Use health professionals to augment what you are learning, to partner with you as you discover what is best for your own children. Reject what doesn’t fit. Nobody loves or knows your baby like you do.