learning disabilities Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

Why God Gave You a Special Needs Child

Why God gave you a special needs child

God gave you a special needs child. It is wonderful-exhausting, and you wouldn’t trade that child for the world. But you don’t know what you’re doing, half the time, and you don’t know how to help. You watch your child struggle to do the things that are considered normal, but he can’t. Friends and family ask you if you’ve figured out “what’s wrong with him.” Strangers criticize.

As the days and years go by, you are depleted of every resource and every idea you ever thought you had about parenting. “Someone else could do this so much better,” you think when the house is hushed and guilt comes to call.

Someone else would be more patient.

Someone else would be more understanding.

Someone else would make fewer mistakes.

Someone else would know what to do.

Why did God give you a special needs child? He had to know you were not qualified. He had to know you were just plain and ordinary and not the kind of person who could handle something like this.

Oh, mama, he knew all of this. The God who made you can see right into your heart, and he knew. He knew you weren’t up to this task.

But God does not just give good gifts to the best people. He gives good gifts to the foolish, the weak, and the ones who do not have it all together. That’s why he gave us Jesus, and that’s why he gave you your child.

God gave you a special needs child as a gift. You did not earn it, and you did not deserve it.

That’s easy to say but hard to see when you’re in the middle of it. Having a child with a disability can be overwhelming and consuming and some days, you feel like a wretch because of how you dealt with the disability and the child who has no control over it.

You don’t feel like a good gift to him or anyone else. You’re just…tired.

God does not just give good gifts to the best people

Underneath it all, deep down in your being where no one can see, that gift is at work. It is softening you to grace, gently breaking you of your need to do better and put on a good show. It is slowly washing away your perfectionism and your need to control by giving you a child who does not always show well, who doesn’t do perfect, and who doesn’t allow for the illusion that you are better than you are.

You are not better than you are. Some people live their whole lives without knowing this. But you are not so deceived. You have a special needs child, and you know the depths of your sin.

But you are learning that God does not turn his back on you because of your sin, and he is not deceived into thinking you are better than you are. He loves you in spite of who you are. His love for you is not based on whether or not your child can recite the alphabet or learn to use the toilet or obey. He loves you when you make progress and when you wake up to find that nothing you did the day before “stuck.”

It’s easy to understand how God can love a child. But mamas, he gave you that child so that you could understand how much he loves you.

He loves you enough to make you lovely.

Somehow, God is at work, using this disability to soften you. Remember when you used to be judgmental? Remember when you used to have time to criticize? Remember when you made assumptions about people and their parenting based on appearances?

God gave you a special needs child to chip away at your superiority. Somewhere over the course of the years of loving a child with “issues,” you lost bits of yourself that needed losing, and gained the beauty of a woman who was being refined by something deeply personal and daily difficult.

You might not be able to see it now, but wait. God gave you a special needs child and that is refining you, even now. Someday, you will realize how much you’ve changed and how much of a gift this really was.

The gift is softening you to grace

Because someday, there will be a mama in church whose child is old enough to sit quietly, but doesn’t. If there’s one thing she needs, it’s understanding, and if there’s one thing you have, it’s grace.

You will not point her to the foyer or make her to feel that her big kid belongs in the nursery. You will whisper “Solidarity” under your breath and remember the time your own child screamed “You’re hurting me!” from one end of Target to the other because the tag on his shirt itched.

Someday, there will be a nine-year-old boy who can’t read the words on the Lego box, and you will not think him stupid. You will smile and read the words for him and look for the things his beautiful brain can do better than reading. And you will find them.

Someday, you will get a thank-you card from a neighbor’s little girl, and you will notice the smiley faces on the hand-drawn flowers and not the misspelled words that won’t stay in the lines.

Someday, you will watch a dad walk his child through the stares and the whispers, and you will not think, “I wonder what’s wrong with that child?” You will say, “How can I help?” Metal and tubes and drool do not bother you anymore. You don’t remember when it happened—but somewhere along the way, you got over appearances. Having a special needs child will do that to you.

You will be grateful with the realization that you are not who you once were. You have been given a precious gift, not because you were good enough for it or because you had all the answers, but simply because God chose you to be the mama of a special needs child.

And that has been a grace.

Author’s note: I used the term special needs because it was the most encompassing term for children with various disabilities, including learning disabilities, which three of my children struggle to overcome. I also have a son with physical disabilities. These are their stories:

Micah

Paul

Kya

Three Words

It was easy to tell with Kya. She listened with wide, vacant eyes and let jumbled words tumble out of her lips. She could not count beyond the number two and stumbled over words longer than a syllable.

We knew with her.

Micah was different. He had a speech delay, to be sure, but his logical brain and quick-thinking masked the reality that he would not be able to read without a daily, excruciating attempt to get the letters and words to hang in a room that had no hooks.

But then there was Paul. Unlike the other two, he took to reading fairly easily.

Except when he didn’t. One day, he could read without missing a word, and the very next day, he couldn’t differentiate between “a” and “the” and confused all the vowel sounds like he had never seen them before. His inconsistency seemed more a matter of the will than a matter of the mind, so I pressed him harder to pay attention. “Focus, Paul!” was my daily mantra, but it didn’t help.

The truth is, I missed it with Paul.

When your twin is barely comprehensible and your sister can’t remember 2+2 without daily drilling, who notices when you turn your sixes and nines around and put b’s on the beginning of words? It’s just cute that you say “bemember” and “beget” and call your jeans “pantses.”

Nevermind that you can’t get dressed in the morning without fifteen reminders, and your shirt is always on backward and for the life, you cannot figure out what’s different about d’s and b’s and p’s. Reading is a daily crap shoot, and sometimes, Mom gets so frustrated, she whaps you on the head with a tattered copy of Little Bear’s Friend because you just read that word, and now you can’t. The other kids have reason to struggle but you…well, you don’t have any of those excuses, so you must not be trying hard enough.

Paul lived seven years before I sat in a learning specialist’s office and listened as she explained how his reading comprehension was at 0% of grade level. He understood oral directions like a four-year-old. An average four-year-old, she emphasized, lest I had delusions of genius preschoolers blowing the curve.

“He also has a high level of anxiety,” she added after thoroughly revealing the degree to which I had been blind to Paul’s needs.

“He does?” I stammered.

“He tells me he worries,” she said, looking at me over her big desk. “I asked him why he doesn’t like school, and he said, ‘I always worry.’”

It was right there in her report. She turned her iPad around so I could see it for myself. “I always worry.”

Three words.

Three words to convict the woman who everyone thinks is so patient and never raises her voice. The woman who writes a blog about children and tells mothers they should enjoy their full quivers because it is the highest calling of God in their lives.

Three words that mean, “I always worry because my mom gets upset when I don’t read well.”

“I always worry because she says my name with anger in her voice when I can’t do what she thinks I can.”

“I always worry because I never know when I’m doing it wrong until she does.”

“I always worry because I should be smarter, but I’m not.”

Three words.

Not “I am loved” or “everyone learns differently” or “you are exceptional” or any other words I wished were planted more deeply in his identity.

I always worry.

My heart snagged on those three words and unraveled me. Oh, my sweet boy.

I had tried so hard, and failed. I had been frustrated, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Day after day, we got up and did it again, only to feel like we weren’t making any progress at all.

And I resented it.

All the Pinterest ideas in the world and my kid still couldn’t remember the word “the.”

Still, I wanted to believe that all the hard work was paying off because it mattered. It mattered that these children learned to work with their disabilities. It mattered that they felt loved even if they couldn’t spell. It mattered that I kept my patience because good mothers don’t get frustrated when their dyslexic children actually act dyslexic.

But I did. Big time.

I drove home with tears sneaking into the corners of my eyes, blurring the road.

Later, when Paul alone remained at the table picking at his dinner the way he does when the food is mixed up and he can’t tell whether he might bite into a tomato, I said, “Your learning specialist told me what you said today.”

Paul’s face flushed and he ducked his head like he thought I had a copy of Little Bear handy. His eyes turned soupy and he could not talk. So he nodded, and then he cried and poured out the broken bits of his heart. He believed he couldn’t do anything right because I get mad at him when he makes mistakes.

I do not get mad at you when you make mistakes! I wanted to say. It’s just frustrating when you don’t try!

I would have said it, too, if the lady behind the big desk had not made it abundantly clear that this little boy had been trying his hardest for long enough, and I had not noticed.

I looked at the tears in my baby’s eyes, knowing full well that it was my sin that put them there.

All this time, I had been crushing Paul. His cheerful, sweet spirit was not enough to earn my favor. I had successfully taught him that he fell short. He could not read the way I thought he should. He could not focus long enough to complete a one-step task or remember to chew with his mouth closed or figure out those crazy b’s and d’s and p’s.

He worried about all those things because every day, they proved to him that Paul simply was not good enough for me.

All of that, in three words. Three horribly true words.

If the world had rolled over on me, it would have been a mercy. With my tears mingling with his, I grabbed my son and whispered three words of my own into his ears: “I’m so sorry.”

Sorry hardly seemed like enough. All I wanted to do was run and hide. How could God have given such precious gifts to such a woman as me? He knew I was impatient, intolerant, and psycho-perfectionistic. And look what happened! Look at what I’d done to my son—I’d taught him that he was somehow less than he should be.

How can sorry be enough for that?

It isn’t enough, but sorry is the gate by which grace rushes in. And grace makes up for what sorry cannot do.

Grace tells me that motherhood is more than just the balance of my successes and failures. God gives children to women who do not deserve it, of which I am a shining example. We break these children with our brokenness, sometimes, and they break us right back.

It is awful, and I can do nothing some days but beg God to keep my sin from taking root in their lives, to protect them from me.

But the beauty of it is this: somehow, God works all these things together to make each of us more like Himself. God chose Paul for me knowing that this mothering thing would be the single greatest refining fire in my life. He also knew that my mothering, mistakes and all, would be the primary shaping force in Paul’s young life to draw him to Christ.

Isn’t that what we need to know as mothers? That despite our failings, God works all these things together for the good of those who have been called to it—mothers and children, children and mothers, all stumbling closer to Jesus as He shouts through our weaknesses of our need for Him. We need the cross.

And when we forget it, God is gracious to remind us.

Even if He has to say it in just three words.

When it Doesn’t Add Up: 100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood {20}

It was the counting by 2’s that got to me.

“Zero—it is zero, right?” Kya asked as she began.

“Yes, the even numbers start with zero.”

“Okay, zero-two-four-six-eight-who do we appreciate?” she chants and dances the way we’ve been doing for months. “Ten…ten-nine-eight-seven-six…”

“No, no Kya, you’re counting backwards now.”

“Oh!” she says with a grin and begins again. “Two-four-six-eight-ten-twenty-thirty-forty…”

“Wait…now you’re counting by tens. Remember, counting by two’s is just skip-counting. Just say our little chant. Remember our little chant?” Of course you remember our chant. We’ve been doing it for months and months and months on end.

Kya jumps right in, happily chanting all the wrong numbers. 12—14—15—16, she says at last, and I do not tell her she is wrong.

“Let’s write them out on paper,” I say instead. Sometimes, seeing the numbers helps, but today, she can’t remember which way a 10 goes, and she can’t remember what to call a 12, and she’s sure that 20 should have a three in it, somewhere.

She can’t do it.

She’s six-and-a-half and she can’t do it. Not today.

I take my heavy heart upstairs, and I think I will not cry. I will not cry. Not today.

But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what is wrong, and I don’t know how to help. I have helped so many children, but I can’t help her.

It is agony. I want nothing more than to protect her from feeling stupid or slow or different. I want to hug her and tell her it’s okay not to know 1+0 or how many cookies you have left if you eat one. Just eat them all, I think, and then it won’t matter.

Because Kya is exceptional, and I want her always to know it.

Under her bright blue eyes and dimpled smile is a pure heart and tender spirit. Always caring, always attentive, always gentle—that’s my Kya. She is delightful, and delighted, in every circumstance. We call her our Sunshine in Seattle, because it’s always sunny when Kya is around.

She is also highly creative and so perceptive, it’s almost unnerving. Even as a baby, she could tell when something was different, something was new, something was off. It was her habit, every morning, to survey my wardrobe choices and give me her unrestrained opinion in the sweetest possible way; we nicknamed her “Quality Control.” She is witty. She is funny. She is the only one of our children who gets her father’s humor and the only one who can, so quickly, give it right back.

But she is also soft. Fragile. Vulnerable. It will not take much to crush her. Not much more than a stack of flashcards she can’t answer. And I worry about that, way down deep and in words I don’t want to say. I think of my impatience and I wonder, “Will I be the one to take it from her? Will I be the one to make her feel less than she is? Will my beautiful baby grow up to feel inadequate because her mother couldn’t let her be enough?”

That brings the tears out that I said I would not cry. That brings me to my knees and I beg, beg, God to make me more patient. Now.

When I come down from upstairs, Kya has drawn a picture for me. It is a page filled up with circles, each one filled up with a different pattern of beautiful colors. Her math page has been decorated with patterns and grinning people with legs and arms coming directly out of their heads. She doesn’t believe in drawing bodies.

She tells the boys all about it, but she can’t think of a word. “I can see it,” she tells them, “I just can’t say it.” Her sentences are filled with pauses and slowly spoken phrases as she tries to collect thoughts from a brain that can’t access words very quickly. When she was a toddler, she had her own language. It bubbled out of her in giggles and turned-around phrases. But she knows enough now to try to reach for words that sit just beyond her grasp.

Oh, how I love her.

She laughs at her brothers and her own silly words and they laugh too. She lets them answer her math facts and then lines them up to tell them Bible stories that are probably heretical and asks them questions that don’t make much sense.

“Paul, what’s first Genesis chapter six?” she asks.

Paul squirms uncomfortably in his chair because he has neglected his lesson.

“It’s God. The answer is God,” she says. “Micah? Mr. Micah? Do you know who made you?”

“Dod,” says Micah, because his tongue doesn’t quite say the things he thinks. Kya understands about that.

“Yes. God,” she says as hushed and holy as possible. Micah and Paul nod and try to remember that in this class, the answer is always God.

The answer is always God.

Who made you? God. Who knows your worth? God. Who created you just as you are? God. Who can be glorified in your weaknesses? God.

I believe. Lord, help my unbelief.

Because it’s one thing to believe it for me. It’s another thing to believe it for my babies. It’s one thing to come to terms with my own faults, but God—oh God! –it’s quite another to come to terms with theirs.

That requires faith, and on this beautiful day of motherhood, I find my faith is lacking. I find my mother-heart tempted to fear. I find myself worrying when I am told to trust. Trust. It is a beautiful thing to be able to trust my children to the God who made them, to see the missing stitch and give them back to the One who knit them together. It is a beautiful thing to know that love always adds up, even when the math facts don’t.