On raising a child with disabilities, part 10: In which I say that it could have been worse, and dedicate this series

In the long run, we were lucky.

While our son faced quite a number of challenges in his childhood, probably inherited from one side of the family or the other, he also inherited the family tendency to outgrow his disabilities sufficiently to be able to lead a normal life.

And while our son had a list of disabilities as long as your arm, most of them were relatively minor.

Hyperactivity? Maybe. I never had him tested, because I was told that, if he could sit still long enough to have a book read to him, he wasn’t hyperactive. From what I’ve learned since then, this may not necessarily be true. But he was never quite wild enough that we couldn’t handle it, with the usual amount of chasing after him and tearing our hair out. Fortunately, he never needed any of the types of medications that have proven helpful to so many hyperactive children.

A bilateral mild-to-moderate hearing loss? That’s probably the only diagnosis on which there’s never been any disagreement.

Emotional disability? No, but sticking that label on him was the only way to get him the help that he needed, so we swallowed our egos and put up with it.

Learning disability? That’s an interesting question. I think that it would be more accurate to describe him as “learning delayed” than as “learning disabled.” Like yours truly, he didn’t learn to read until third grade—a condition which I describe as “delayed reading readiness”—and like me, he didn’t waste any time catching up. In third grade, he was two years behind what was considered an age-appropriate reading level. By the time he was in fifth grade, he was two years ahead. As for his math skills, I don’t know whether he took after me or after Albert Einstein—like both of us, he had a very difficult time mastering basic arithmetic. But unlike me, he made up for it in spades. If anyone had told me, when he was ten years old and having trouble learning the times tables, that by the time he was twenty, he’d be majoring in physics, I would have thought they were out of their minds. Life is just full of surprises, and occasionally, they’re pleasant ones.

Attention Deficit Disorder? Personally, I never really saw that as one of his problems, but I may have been wrong.

Pervasive Developmental Delays? I once brought some smiles to the faces of the folks on one of his evaluation teams by describing P.D.D. as a catch-all diagnosis for kids whose disabilities aren’t clear-cut enough to be diagnosed as anything else. This diagnosis, such as it is, probably covered the learning delays, the Pragmatic Language Deficit, and the Expressive Spatial Dyssemia combined, though I think the Oppositional Defiant Disorder was probably in a class by itself.

The good news is that our son, like his parents before him, has overcome or outgrown his disabilities enough to join the mainstream.

Having seen the kids in his special-ed school who were in the vocational track or the sheltered-workshop track, and having become acquainted with other children with more serious disabilities, and their parents, I know how fortunate we were, in the long run.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to dedicate this series on raising a child with disabilities:

To Z, whose posts about her autistic son (see http://jewview.blogspot.com/) inspired me to come out of the closet as the mother of a child with disabilities and write this series, and to her husband, Anthony and the aforementioned son, Evan. Z’s response to my series was to publish a series of her own, “When Something’s Wrong” (see 2.20.2005). If you haven’t already read it, I strongly recommend that you do so.

To all those who read, commented on, and/or linked to this series.

To all the children, and the parents thereof, who went through special ed. with our son, from pre-school all the way through high school.

To all his teachers, assistant teachers, therapists, social workers and/or counselors.

To the evaluation teams, and, especially, to the speech and language pathologist who finally diagnosed our son's Pragmatic Language Deficit.

To the non-profit organizations that helped us.

To the educational evaluator and the lawyer who helped us get him into a state-subsidized special-ed. school.

To the administrators and support staff (office, technical, maintenance, etc.), and to the hard-working parents, local celebrities, and businesses who gave of their time and/or efforts , donated products or services, or just plain opened their checkbooks to raise money for our son's allegedly state-subsidized but outrageously-underfunded school.

To our friends the former secular Yiddishist and his wife (who dragged him, no longer kicking and screaming, into synagogue life when she chose not only him but also Judaism), and to their two kids, who faced challenges when they were younger.

To the Military Man, and to our friends his mom and the-dad-who-raised-him, who’s finally getting his act together after a tough time dealing with his learning difficulties.

To our dear friend Chanah Blumah, who’s still fighting the good fight to ensure that her two young adults get the help that they need.

To my parents, who somehow managed to raise a decent bunch of kids even though I’m reasonably certain that at least two of the four of us, including me, have undiagnosed learning disabilities.

To my husband’s parents, aleihem hashalom (roughly translated, "rest in peace"), who, despite his mother's having had a life-long undiagnosed serious disability of her own, defied the doctors who told them to put their older, hyperactive son into an institution and raised him to the best of their abilities, thus enabling him to graduate college, serve our country, return to college and earn a master’s degree, and, eventually, marry me!

And last, but very far from least, to my brother-in-law, and, especially, to my sister-in-law, one of the most dedicated and loving mothers I have ever known, who fought the good fight to help their son overcome his attention deficit disorder, hyperactive disorder, and learning disabilities, and won many a battle, only to lose the war when their son died of a fatal genetic disease of unknown origin at the same age that our son is now. May their son’s memory be a blessing, and may we and her parents be blessed to see joy in the eyes of their daughter.