Wednesday, February 13, 2013

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.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You made me cry...but also realize this is just one more bridge to cross and follow thru with.....I have 4 exceptionally gifted children with one just needing a little more help to become an even more special child...thank you..

CPA Mom said...

Thank you Thank you Thank you! My Special Gifts child is perfect to me xoxo

Andi said...

Having been there as well I understand. It always hurt me so much that everyone was so willing to point out so quickly what was "wrong" with my children, instead of taking the time to tell me what was right. There was so many things that were wonderful and beautiful, and where they had strengths. Yet, our school system does nothing most of the time but focus on the "wrong", the "square pegs", the ones that throw off those oh so precious test scores.

LL Cool Joe said...

Beautiful work. Beautiful words.

I have a child who is dyslexic and a child who is epileptic. They are beautiful, talented and intelligent. And lovely kids, and maybe that's because of their disabilities.