Movin' On

 
An excerpt from Journey With Jeff; Inspiration for Caregivers of People with Special Needs; originally written to a family whose son was waiting to enter a community residence.~~~My beautiful fellow-parents, your son is ready, too, as mine was a little while ago, to leave home and live in a residence. A natural thing for a young man to do, right? Sure, if he isn't developmentally disabled! But wait a minute....No matter what goes on between the ears of our kids, they have the same needs and feelings of every person...to be loved, to be needed, to be all they're capable of being! I remember, and I relive the trauma with you...All the questions whirling around inside your head...What if he gets sick at the residence, or angry, or worried? So many of the staff are so young! How will they handle him? Will they understand him? Will he adjust quickly? No one can care for him like his own parents! Inside, you know this is for his greatest good! You know this is for your geatest good! His independence...Your independence. Thank God it's a process which takes time! I don't think I could have let him go if Jeff had left in one fell-swoop! We had to feel need first - the difficulty of handling him, the difficulty of finding babysitters, my fear of burning out from sheer exhaustion. A workshop at MDC offered us respite weekends -- shared care! It was tough driving away, leaving him at the Culver Road Residence. I left a huge chunk of myself there too. Time and time again I hollered for help from the Lord! And the help God sent was in the form of people...many, many people. People such as Joan Van de Wall, who came to the residence to pick up Jeff for church and Sunday school...and, eventually, the Seed Group, and then a confirmation class. One Pentecost we celebrated something we never dreamed could happen...Ecstatic tears ran down our faces as Jeff plus three other developmentally disabled young men were confirmed! We were proud, too, eighteen months after beginning these respite weekends when Jeff received an award at BOCES for gaining three years of social growth...in one! (To be continued...)