Hi. I just finished your book Eyeball This and enjoyed it. ... But you needed a better proofreader. The changes in tense and left out words or incorrect words kept distracting me. Also, it's shape was memoir rather than novel. Still, I'm trying to figure out who to give it to next. Maybe I should take it to the local University Physics department and leave it in the lounge.

I understand the feelings about school and your son. I homeschooled our three brilliant sons (one with mild Asperger's like me) Christian-schooled our fetal-alcohol effected daughter (for all the good it did for a child who never did accept me as her mother and wanted to play the slut) and public-schooled our violent wookie with autism plus nonverbal, MR, OCD, bipolar, etc. Somehow, we found schools that were willing to work around one daughter's mental handicaps, but no Christian school could deal with the Wookie. Public school hardly could. I was never allowed to be more than fifteen minutes from her school so I could get her quickly before they had to call the police.
One person in a thousand member church once told me not to bring the wookie to Sunday School ever again, and I can remember the deep bitterness of rejection and hatred of the entire church, but I finally got over myself and went to the pastor with a hope for solution. We hired a director and got volunteers and started a Sunday Morning Respite program. A few years after we moved, the church dissolved but the program morphed into a secular summer program for Autistic kids from several counties.
In our present little church, we have not been able to start a respite program of any sort. But our now 31-yr-old daughter is a mascot of sorts as she wanders briefly around church on Sunday morning checking out the singing, getting coffee, getting paper, checking out the babies etc before going back to her home and obsessively cutting paper while one of us stays with her until her companion care-provider returns from her church.
Yes, how can privately financed Christian schools pay for all the extra our children need? Our oldest son actually found a Christian school that could deal with learning disabled kids for 8,000 extra a year. So one grandson goes there with our provision and next year the other grandson will double our obligation to (don't think about it!) 26,000. Per year. [Come to think of it, that's what I paid to get my last two kids. Once. Although both ending up costing us... let's not think about that either.] My husband with his new practice needs more patients, many more patients. Yeah, God's way of keeping us from materialism.
Lelia Foreman | 12.04.08 - 10:22 pm | #

Lelia Foreman,

Amazing story.
heddle | Homepage | 12.05.08 - 4:30 am | #