April is Austism Awareness Month

My brother, at culinary art school, with his niece, my daughter

After my last post I started thinking about how sometimes children don’t always end up the way we’d like. I think most, if not all, parents dream that their children all grow up to be intelligent, financially stable people who marry a wonderful person and lives happily ever after. I’m fairly confident that Timothy McVeigh’s mother didn’t have hopes that her son would grow up to blow up a building and kill/injure hundreds of people. Sadly, despite all of our efforts, our children become a person that we don’t approve of or a challenge in our lives.

April is Autism Awareness month so I’ve been thinking a lot about my younger brother. As a baby and toddler he seemed like most of the other children I was around. When he turned three he started acting different, but since he was the only sibling I have, I didn’t really know better. My family would chuckle at the funny quirks he had and just shrug it off as a “Jesse-ism”. It wasn’t until he reached third grade that things went from silly to challenging. My brother started having huge problems at school with the other children, with his teacher, and therefore problems at home with my parents. The next several years were filled with a lot of screaming, crying, and frustration from everyone.  My parents thought because he was verbal and physically able to function that his “specialness” wasn’t something that needed outside help. (Side note- This was going on during the 1990s when a lot of new research about autism was becoming available and the special education laws were being revamped. My parents, like many people then, thought that autism was a word used only for those children who were nonverbal, extremely violent, and with obvious physical impairments.)

Now to tie this into adoption- You get what you get. For whatever reason, Heavenly Father sends us the children that he does for a reason only known to Him. We pray to have a child in our family and then we need to always pray for them. Pray for patience, pray for love, and pray that everything turns out for the best. Our challenges in life are meant to strengthen us and help us to become better people. What better way can a mother, or father, show true devotion than to take care of a child? There will be days that we will be brought to our knees in sorrow and/or frustration over our children. But with the help of the Lord, we will move on and continue to progress.

They are ours to teach us more than we will ever teach them, of this I am sure.

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