Tag: family
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The Story Behind We’re All A Little Broken
Why is the name of my blog We’re All A Little Broken? Until recently, I was crediting the title to something my husband said to me in the middle of a particularly emotional conversation about our son’s struggles. “We’re all broken.” I remember thinking at the time how wise and true that statement was. We…
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Letting Go to Hold On
This week has been hard. Most weeks are hard lately, but this week was hard in a different sort of way as I painfully let go of something I loved, in order to hold on tighter to the people I love. I believe deeply that we all have an obligation to do as much as we…
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Between a Rock & a Hard Place
Parenting a child struggling with anxiety and panic is the personification of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Our days are marked not by hours, but by the spaces between anxiety fueled outbursts or shutdowns and panic attacks. We have very little control over the “rock” or “hard place” moments. But I’m beginning…
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Why Our Story, Isn’t Just “Our” Story
My intelligent, compassionate, musically gifted, goofy 10-year-old son has a level 1 autism spectrum disorder, and has recently been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and a panic disorder. As parents, we knew there was something wrong almost 2 years ago. We consulted various specialists, consented to a variety of tests and assessments, and our son has…
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It Might Be Time for a Dream Catcher
When I was 11, my grandfather had a brain aneurysm rupture. He was hospitalized for days before he died. The entire time he was in the hospital, I had a horrible dream each night that a masked man with a gun was threatening to shoot every person in my extended family. That dream was my adolescent brain’s…
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Your Most Important Tools
I was able to do one of my most favorite things today – chaperone a class field trip. I was with my daughter’s 3rd grade class at a living history presentation about the daily lives of Native Americans. The educator giving the tour asked, “What was the most important tool the native people had?” My…
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“You’re Okay. You’re Okay. You’re Okay.”
Mother’s Day 2016 I woke up this morning at the LA Zoo with my daughter, the 10 other girls in her Brownie troop, and 3 other mothers. We had a troop sleepover at the zoo on Saturday night. Not a traditional start to a Mother’s Day, but even with a body sore from sleeping on…
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If Anybody Needs Me, I’ll Be Right Here (But please don’t need me)
Thursday is my Friday – and this was a doozy of a day. Earlier in the week I wrote about The “Name” I Don’t Want to See on Caller ID. Today the school popped up on my caller ID, as I was in a meeting with a table full of people, and this time it was (a…
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The “Name” I Don’t Want to See on Caller ID
My cell phone rang a couple of hours ago. I glanced down to see who was calling, and felt a pit in my stomach when I saw the call was from my kids’ school. In the past the first thought would have been, “I wonder which one of them is sick.” Today my first thought…
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Ripping Off The Bandaid
These are the lessons I have learned since deciding rip off the bandaid to share both my son’s diagnoses, and our family’s journey, with the world. A “label” isn’t always a bad thing – We spent a long time not wanting to “label” our son, and therefore were not straightforward with him, ourselves or others. This came from a…
We're All A Little Broken 