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.
