A Different Kind of Hero
For 36 days, our dear friends sat by their son’s hospital bed. Their son, who was born with multiple disabilities had been in and out of the hospital before during his 29 years, but this time he returned to his heavenly home and went to be with the Lord on October 30th. Our hearts and our prayers are so focused on this precious family right now. We wish we could help them in some way. We know that many of you, who have a child with special needs, have spent time in and out of the hospital, because the reality [...]
Joy in the Journey
Over the past several weeks, we talked about the unique and varied challenges that face a marriage when couples are parenting a child with special needs. We mentioned last week that couples often feel isolated, finding it hard to physically get out the door and hard to “fit in” once you get there. We’ve talked about the hurts individuals have felt because sometimes people that are close to us, who should understand our situation, often don’t. These things are true and representative, at times, of what our lives are like; but we would be remiss if we stopped there. We [...]
Isolation
Well, the Hallmark Christmas movie season is upon us. Brian, who isn’t one for movies in general, has probably never seen a Hallmark movie; but I confess, that on more than one occasion, I’ve taken my box of tissues and watched a Hallmark movie. Of course, in a Hallmark movie everything turns out splendidly: families are reunited; true loves are rediscovered; wayward children return home and organ transplants come through at the last minute and it’s a perfect match! I truly wish all of life’s problems could be solved in 2 hours; perhaps that is why I watch the Hallmark [...]
The “S” Word …
Can you believe it is our twentieth blog? Can you also believe that we’ve done 20 blogs on marriage and we are only now getting to talk about sex? Of course, you can. We all know that sex is incredibly important to a marriage, but we rarely talk about it. In fact, most of us probably talk about it face-to-face with our spouse even less. And if it is hard to discuss, imagine how hard it is to write a blog on the subject!!! But we risk our pride and reputations in doing so because of how important it is. [...]
God Gave You Mary …
Very often, someone has come up to us and said, “God gave you Mary because He must have known that you would be able to handle parenting a child with a disability,” or some variation of that statement. While we know that people mean well and are trying to be encouraging to us, it sometimes is hard to hear. Mostly, it is hard to hear because we respectfully disagree. We disagree in two ways. First, and of less importance, we disagree with the statement because it seems to imply that for us, raising Mary has been relatively easy. And if [...]
To help or not to help, that is the question!
A commonly asked questions that we hear from friends who don’t have a child with a disability is, “Should we offer to help someone when their disabled child has a need, or will offering help offend the parents?” We generally know how we would answer that question, but this is an individual decision. We would love to hear some feedback on this, as we think this topic might provide for an interesting conversation! Because Mary is non-verbal, she often tries to communicate her wishes and desires through her behavior, more specifically mis-behavior. Mary’s strategy of choice used to be that [...]