All mothers of special needs children find their way out of denial eventually. None of them realize they’re on the road to acceptance, they just think they’re lost.
The first place you can stop to get gas on your way out of Denial is a place called Resignation. There’s only 2 things in Resignation: A gas station, so you can keep driving, and a Barnes and Noble, so you can read up on where to go next. You head into Barnes and Noble feeling very sad, praying there is some instruction manual detailing how you should live out the rest of your life. Initially you’re full of hope when you enter the “Special Needs” section because there are hundreds of books about disabled children. However, hope quickly turns to dismay because the instruction manual you were hoping to find just isn’t there. So you head to the customer service desk and ask the nice lady, “Do you have a book entitled something along the lines of, Your Kid Is All Fucked Up and Pees on Cereal in Shoprite but Don’t Worry I Can Tell You What to Do Now? And because she works at the Barnes and Noble in Resignation and gets asked this question 60 times a day, the nice lady replies, “No dear but try this one, I hear it’s an excellent read.” Then she hands you one of about 325 books entitled, something along the lines of, “The Gift of a Special Needs Child.” Now when you see this book, with some gorgeous, photo-shopped woman clutching her disabled child with a look of utter tranquility upon her face, you think “Oh my God! Look at this woman. It says right here her son has _____ syndrome and she’s calling him a gift! She didn’t fix her son. It doesn’t even look like she tried. She just accepts him and thinks he’s wonderful. Surely if this woman can change her mind about having a disabled child I can too. I shall read his book. I will buy all 325 versions of “The Gift of a Special Needs Child” and then everything will get better. I will be better and Kevin will be better.
And what a crock of steaming hot elephant shit all those books were: filled with self-righteous, verbal diarrhea. If you are standing in line at the Barnes and Noble in Resignation… STOP! Do not buy these books. These books are a big tub of pig urine all written by wealthy women who can afford the very best therapy and private schools. More importantly, they can afford endless hours of daycare for when the going gets tough, and a cleaning lady for when their son decides to melt down and spread shit on the walls.
I am addressing this post to all the women, authors or not, who go around saying they’ve been given the gift of a special needs child.
Hi ladies!! I can’t tell you how many years I have spent hating you and your books. However, living in the land of acceptance makes people a little more open minded, and I have come to believe that SOME of you are genuinely trying to help people by saying you’ve been given the gift of a special needs child. I am here to tell you that you’re not. You are not helping any member of the Nobody Wants To Be A Member of This Club Including Us Club by saying you have been given the gift of a special needs child. YOUR child may be a gift, but some of us have children who wipe their shit on the walls when they get angry enough and something tells me that if YOUR child behaved that way, you wouldn’t think of him as a gift. You would think of him as a punishment and would hate, with every fiber of your being, the people who went around saying they’d been given the gift of a special needs child. So stop saying it. Stop it right now.
See I am an angry person. When I hear your “gift” bullshit I just get angry and daydream about my son wiping his shit on your face instead of my walls. But not all people are like me. Some people are vulnerable. When you start spouting your “gift” bullshit, vulnerable people think: “Gee, that woman doesn’t hate her son, she LOVES him and thinks he’s a treasure from God. I must be a terrible mother. If only I was like her, maybe I wouldn’t hate myself or wish he’d never been born.” And now Miss Vulnerable, who was depressed BEFORE you started touting your “gift” bullshit, is now downright suicidal. Go you.
So if you would like to continue saying you’ve been given the gift of a special needs child you have my permission, PROVIDED you have the balls to preface that statement with one of the horrors you have had to endure while parenting him. Try something like this:
In Kevin’s kindergarten year he became wildly and unimaginably aggressive. One day he flew into a rage and started going after not only me, but his sisters. When that didn’t get him what he wanted, he tore into the living room and destroyed all my figurines. I didn’t know what to do, so I locked him in his room. After 30 minutes of relentless screaming things got kinda quiet up there so I went to check on him. I opened the door to discover my son had defecated on the floor and painted the walls with his shit.
And NOW that I have bared my soul, by my own rules, I could say I’ve been given the gift of a special needs child if I wanted to. What you ladies don’t seem to understand is this: if you want to use that insulting, fuckwad of a statement you have to earn it, and most of you haven’t because you lack the balls to be honest. If you don’t preface that statement with some piece of pain and humiliation YOU’RE NOT HELPING ANYONE!!!!!! You are no different than Connie the Cunt who told my aunt, “ MY children never behaved that way.” And I want so much to believe you ladies aren’t out to be Connie the Cunt.
My story about the shit on my walls just helped someone. Someone, somewhere, thinks she is the ONLY person on Earth whose son shits on the floor and spreads it on the walls. Now she knows she’s not and I’m going to go further and give her some hope: Things like shit on the wall don’t happen anymore. Kevin isn’t like that anymore. Things are really pretty good these days. He still hits me on occasion and throws tantrums but it’s nothing compared to what it used to be. He’s doing great in school, has a million girlfriends, and is currently playing a squirrel in the school play. We still have bad days, but most of the time I love him and can’t imagine my life without him.
Dear “gift of a special needs child” ladies,
I live in the land of Acceptance now and I sure as fuck didn’t get here by reading any of your books. Someday I’M going to write a book. It’s going to be called Monkey Balls: The Truth About Parenting A Special Needs Child. And it’s going to fly off the shelves because unlike any of your books, it will be honest and it will help people. So if you’re currently writing your next book, “Special Needs Kids, It Just Keeps Getting Better!” Include an honest story, or do us all a favor and shut the fuck up.
I needed this post years ago before I dropped my life savings on books from Barnes and Noble only to get so angry with some of them that I started tearing out pages. Sigh.
I would like to return my gift for the upgraded model.
I hear you!
Burn them!