Some years back, while people were greeting each other happy new year, I got a call from a mum with a special needs kid. She asked me how she could get foster parents or a boarding school for her child. Her child had a really complicated diagnosis. Her husband had walked away from the marriage and her family had asked her to abandon the child and move on. She was all alone.
Another time, I sat beside a woman and her mum. The woman carried on her laps, her child with physical and developmental disorder and I heard her make a very unpleasant statement. She said that no one in her side of the family had a child with disability. However, her husband’s sibling does so he has to take full responsibility for the child’s disability. Her mother nodded in agreement. It wasn’t rock science to predict the future of that marriage.
I have counselled mums whose husband left the home because of the presence of their special needs child. I have also seen cases where the woman left home and abandoned the special needs child. (On a lighter side, my mum said maybe the wife saw that the husband wanted to run away so she beat him to it.)
A woman once told me that her husband left her because of the presence of their special needs child in the home. I said, point of correction, your husband didn’t leave you because of the child, he left you because of his character trait. The presence of the child only fast tracked the date of departure. I told her that if something bad had happened to her, maybe prolonged illness or accident, he would have left.
Challenges, victories, celebrations are part of life. It is how we handle them that matter. I remember a story in the good book. A wise man built his house on a rock, the rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. A foolish man built his house on the sand the rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.
The common denominator here was the circumstance – the challenges that the wise man and the foolish man faced. Everyone will face one challenge or the other, it is part of life.
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