It's Exceptional To Be Special

Valentine's Cookies for a special friend and his beau.  

I had a long talk with "My Person" this morning.  She was coming home devastated after her first meeting with the Exceptional Education Office in her school district.  Those of us who are the parents of special needs children know what meeting I'm talking about and the punch in a gut that it gives you. The meeting where you have to hear and accept that there is something "wrong" with our child.  You are given lots of suggestions and are even told that a problem may exist in the way we parent.

It is one of the low points of being a mother.

We are typically fixers...we fix dinner, we make everything run in the household...we try to hold it down for the success of the family.

Being told your child has special needs is not something we can readily "fix".  It sucks the life out of everyone and it begins with the mother.

During the course of our conversation, I realized that there is just something so wrong with labeling someone as "special needs"....when it should be "special gifts".

If we are going to be really honest here,  every person on this planet has special needs.  We all have strengths and weaknesses.  We make special accommodations for people on a daily basis and we never realize it.

I understand that it is the goal of a school system to make accommodations to allow each child to be served with success and purpose.  I get that.  A system has to serve the masses, but sometimes a child will be deemed inadequate for simply not fitting into a certain set of parameters.

He is the special child.

She is the mother whose heart is breaking.

In a perfect world, we would see that children each have a learning style that is special to them and gear our educational programs toward teaching groups differently.

Visual Learners, Abstract Learners, Contemplative Learners, and Macro Learners.

Teachers should be matched with their core group based on their own learning styles which would give examples for the students to model.

Yes, a perfect world.

A perfect world would never send a mother away in tears after telling them that something is "wrong" with their child.

So, here's my salute for the special people out there...the one's who were told they were exceptional.  We all have gifts and deficits.

I have a hyper acute visual gift, but higher level math is completely greek to me.

I'm okay with that.

This is Home Girl and I'm sending a big hug to "My Person" and all other parents of those "special needs" kids.  There is nothing wrong with our babies.  The world just hasn't seen "what's so right" about them yet.