Parents

A Mother's Heart a peom by Peggikaye Eagler

"Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for -children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts"
Marian Wright Edelman
  TSparents is an e-mail group for parents of kids who have TSplus.  That is, Tourette plus one or more comorbid disorders such as ADHD, OCD, ODD, Bipolar,  Asperger's or another related condition.  If TSparents is full you will be subscribed to TSparents-2.  

Click to subscribe to TSparents

  TSparents-2 is like TSparents . TSparents is so wonderful and has so many great subscribers who write so many wonderful posts so very often that it becomes difficult to keep up, so TSparents-2 is another list just like TSparents, for parents of TSplus kids.

Click to subscribe to TSparents-2

    TicTalkParents is a new e-mail group moderated by Karen O'Grady.
This group is for parents of kids with Tourette's Syndrome or a tic disorder who have only tics and no comorbid disorders or very mild Comrobids.  

Click to subscribe to TicTalkParents

      Homeschool/Unschool - Plus is a new list for Homeschoolers/Unschoolers with special needs children.

  
 TS-General is set up as an off-topic e-mail group for TSparents.  Conversations regarding flying buses, smoking prunes, and absent thoughts of monkeys are highly encouraged.  This list has very high volume email and is affectionatly called TSBS because of the wild nature of the topic content.  To subscribe to this group you must first be a high volume participant in one of the other TicTalk e-mail groups.

  Chats for parents for Parents of TSkids

  AOL's Parent Soup Chat AOL has a chat for parents of kids who have TS.  
                       Use the keyword Parent Soup to find the chat.  

Join me, Patti, at Raisingkids.tv for a Tourette chat on Thursday nights at 9 PM Eastern time.

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  "Welcome To Holland"  
by
Emily Perl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a
disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience
to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.  It's like this...

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip
- to Italy.  You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans.  
The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice.  You may learn
some handy phrases in Italian.  It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.  You pack your
bags and off you go.  Several hours later, the plane lands.  The stewardess
comes in a says, "Welcome to Holland".

"Holland?!?" you say.  "What do you mean Holland?  I signed up for Italy! I'm
supposed to be in Italy.  All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan.  They've landed in Holland and
there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting,
filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease.  It's just a different
place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks.  And you must learn a whole new
language.  And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have
met.

It's just a different place.  It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than
Italy.  But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath,
you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland
has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all
bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.  And for the rest of
your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go.  That's
what I had planned."

The pain of that will never, ever, ever go away, because the loss of that
dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy,
you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about
Holland.

(Emily Perl Kingsley, Emmy-award winning writer
and activist for the rights of people with disabilities,
was the guest speaker at the 1989 JARC annual
meeting.)                                                                          
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  A MOTHER'S HEART   

 Every mother has Dreams,
 Of a child perfect and whole,
 Every mother has Hopes,
 For perfection, body and soul.

 They told me you're not perfect,
 Sweet loving child of mine,
 They told me that your learning
 Is taking too much time.

 They tell me that your tests came back,
 Showing problems and low scores,
 They tell me that you have to struggle,
 This hurts me to the core.

 Every mother has dreams,
 They tell me you don't fit.
 Every mother has hopes,
 They say perfection you won't hit.

 But they don't see what I see,
 The smile that lights your face.
 But they don't hear what I hear,
 Your laughter reveals God's grace.

 They don't see what I see,
 My child loving and whole.
 I have Hopes and Dreams,
 Because my child you are a gift from God
 And you have a PERFECT SOUL.

 Written by      Peggikaye Eagler
                                                    January 30, 2000
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