I have two wonderful children and love being a mom, but the fact is, parenting can be brutal.
You start with all these great plans, knowing just what kind of child you’ll have, how you’ll nurture all the qualities you value, how you won’t make the ridiculous mistakes you can so clearly see your friends making.
And then you have the kid.
It doesn’t take long to realize said kid has other plans. Almost immediately, at least in my case, a willful and unique personality was letting me know he was going to be himself — thank you very much — not my fantasy child. My daughter was no different.
But, of course, that’s the brilliance of it all. In fact, the greatest thing parenting can teach us, apart from profound love, is that we’re not the boss of life. Rather, we’ve entered a new universe where preconceived notions crash into reality and the best we can do is look, learn and love the one-of-a-kind individual who’s now the centre of our world.
I think of this as I read our story in today’s paper about the Chan family. When Sharon Chan and her husband set out to have a family, I doubt three special needs children, one not even verbal, is what they envisioned.
Yet, mom laughs as she says, “every day is different” and describes her house as “entertaining.” I suspect her remarkable resilience comes in large part from cherishing each one of her kids for who they are, even as they veer from the script.
The impetus for this story is to illustrate Variety — The Children’s Charity’s good work ahead of its big fundraiser. Thanks to Variety, the Chan children have received speech, as well as feeding, therapy. The daughter, who was getting dangerously thin, has learned how to eat, and the youngest son, who could barely talk, is now striking up conversations.
It’s great this family has been helped, but I’m also thinking of the story we ran two weeks ago in which Janice Barr, the executive director of Richmond’s Society for Community Living, said 175 Richmond families cannot send their children to pre-school or daycare because their children need extra support and there’s no funding to provide it.
We know what early intervention can do. Chan’s kids are living proof. So, it’s hard to understand why we’re letting so many others languish without it — but we are. According to Barr, there’s been no increases in services for children with developmental disabilities in the past 10 years. Which brings me to the upcoming provincial election — a time when purse strings tend to loosen.
If we truly believe in variety, if we truly believe every child has the right to reach his/her potential then, for sure, let’s support the Variety telethon, but 10 years is a long time.
That needs to change.
