It Starts By Facing Your Fears

I know first hand the terrifying feeling of asking yourself what if? What if something happened to me? What if I got ill? What if I get in a car accident and I'm debilitated? What would happen to my child? Who would care for him or her? You know those questions that haunt you at 3:00 in the morning. The ones that you don't allow others to ask you. The questions that if someone actually gets the nerve to ask that you answer by saying something like, "I just won't get ill ever." Or even more illogical: "Well, I'm never growing old?". Ok, maybe you won't ever grow old, but that means you'll be dead, which isn't so great either in terms of providing for your child. Well, that's what a lot of us go through. Actually, that's at least a step in the right direction. At least we are admitting that our child needs ongoing life care for their entire life. There are still a lot of folks out there with involved adolescent or young adult children who are still hopeful that somehow some way their child will be totally independent-like in terms of getting married and going to college and being on their own. Seriously. I know these people. Sometimes, most of the time actually, I'm polite and reserved. But there is the inner me thats dying to be the Dr.Laura of the autism world and tell them to snap out it and wake up from the daydream they are having and face the music. I'm kind of starting to do it with posts like this, aren't I? Maybe what we can all start doing right away is just one little thing to be on the safe side. Face your fear. Accept the fact that there is a good likelihood that your special needs child will need some type of support service for a long time-possibly the rest of their life. And then be proactive. How can you do that, you ask? I recommend that you start by writing down everything that's involved in your child's life. Everything that you can think of and organize it in a way that someone else could follow it if they needed to. I've done that, and I organized it into sections of a book I call Blake's Lifecare book. If you want the blank sheets that you can use to put in your own child's information, I'll send them to you. Just email me your email address or leave it on the blog. Let's get started.