I’ve been missing-in-action for a few weeks. And today I’m blogging just to say my farewells. After 27 months of being an Adoptionblogs blogger, I’m hanging up my keyboard. It’s been a marvelous experience. After more than two years of daily blogging about parenting children with special needs, I’ve covered many of the topics we all face daily. We’ve talked about a lot of things, from specific disabilities and interventions to the commonality in the struggles all children with disabilities face to the need for strong advocacy for our children in schools, the medical community and their daily lives.

Parenting children with special needs, whether you purposely head into the adoption knowing how special your child is or whether you learn this afterwards, is the ultimate in exhaustion and reward as a parent! We are definitely in the professional parenting league!

I have enjoyed sharing with you what I’ve learned through the school of hard-knocks and hope that in someway it makes finding what your children need easier for you.

And that is both the reason I began blogging here and the reason I’m leaving now: to give back to other families who need the knowledge and support I have gathered through experience. Blogging here was an act of giving back, and it was highly therapeutic for me to know that our family’s struggles were actually helping others. But my work through the Attachment & Trauma Network (ATN) is equally important and the need for me to give there and through other advocacy efforts is increasing.

In many ways the statistics from the CDC about the number of traumatized children in this country hit me hard (1 in 50 infants). They put the magnitude of the problem in clear focus. Since ATN’s mission is support, education and advocacy for the families parenting these hurting children, we need to do more. So I will be spending the daily time I would have spent on this blog on ATN efforts.

Then there are the other advocacy efforts I’ve learned about through my year as a Partners in Policymaking participant. (I graduate this Saturday!) The need to communicate with lawmakers, make the public aware of the challenges people with disabilities face, and help other parents learn what I know compete for some of my time as well. Earlier this month, I took a field trip with some of my classmates to Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, one of the earliest “insane asylums” in this country and in the 1960s one of the largest. It was a life-changing experience.

So, I’m giving up blogging to put on a more active advocacy hat. But there are personal reasons, too.

My older daughter Kay will be a high school senior next year. I want to relish in this coming year with her and give her the attention she needs as she makes her decisions about colleges and her future life. I don’t want to miss a single second. All too soon she’ll be grown and gone.

And there’s LuLu herself, who is thriving in her virtual school environment. Despite all my belly-aching about not wanting to be her full-time learning coach, it has truly been the best educational experience she’s had. What looked like major crises last fall with her health in so many ways are stabilizing (yes, her hormones are coming under control…yea!). And things are looking up for LuLu. She has a great occupational therapist and a great speech therapist provided through Georgia Virtual Academy, and is learning self-regulation skills that are helping to make the difference, too.

These past few weeks have been about me bringing all this into clearer focus and some soul-searching on where I need to spend my precious time. I enjoy writing and loved hearing from all of you. Your comments challenged me to think and affirmed that we’re all in this together. I will miss you.



Photo Credit: Julie Beem