Marriage

A friend of mine recently admitted she felt like a failure because her little RADish didn’t seem to be making much progress and it was having an effect on her family, her marriage, and herself.  She was struggling to remain loving and supportive because her RADish was taking everything she had to give. Being the mother of a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder is beyond exhausting.  I would say being a parent in itself is a tiring job, but when the complexities of an emotionally damaged child is added in, exhaustion doesn’t go far enough to describe how you feel at the end of the day. Nancy Thomas wrote a book about RAD called When Love is Not Enough.  This was the first book… [more]

I am writing this from a hotel room in Tennessee, while my aging mom sleeps (Parkinson’s disease slows her down) and in between visits to my mom’s cousin and his wife who are wasting away by millimeters in a marginal nursing home here in Tennessee. These are folks who never had kids, but who would have made great parents. Fred has Parkinson’s as well, and is intermittently “with it” and not. Irene has been bed-ridden for months, is losing her hearing, and is far less with it than she was when we last made this long trip. I have never, ever done well in nursing homes. I don’t know what is in my parent’s future, but it scares me. So where am I… [more]

When I wrote this blog, it was 3 AM this morning and I was tooling along Interstate 35 in Des Moines. Not to worry, I wasn’t driving while typing… my husband of 29 years was at the wheel. Twenty nine years today, as a matter of fact. We left on Friday and drove 600+ miles to Gurnee, Illinois where we used to live. On Friday night we gathered at Olive Garden with a dozen other ATN parents. More on that later… This was a “wedding weekend.” On Saturday afternoon we attended the wedding of a high school friend of Kyle and Marie’s. Kyle was in the wedding. We left the wedding at 9 PM Saturday night and drove back to Kansas in… [more]

I am writing this morning from St. Louis. My husband and I drove the four hours here on Friday afternoon in order to attend a Love and Respect marriage conference… courtesy of Kyle and Marie. Their first anniversary is coming up next month and they attended this conference a few months ago. They were so impressed with the message they asked us if we would like to attend, and ultimately this opportunity became our Christmas present from them. How cool is that? There was a great deal of good information and a plethora of “Ah-HA!” moments during the 7-8 hours we listened. Much of the way the speaker described men and women and their different reactions to things made perfect sense to me…… [more]