Marie – How has the injury affected your parenting?

Parenting can be challenging on a regular basis, and a lot of the things are parallels with an able-bodied person.  You do need to be more aware of your own frustrations.  If the milk spills, is that really the child’s fault, or are you frustrated because you can’t get down there and clean it up real quick?  And try not to project your own frustrations onto the child.  That’s been my biggest challenge, trying not to let my shortcoming, or my limitations affect my relationship with my children.  I can remember trying to put my son in a timeout, and he’d jump into the middle of the bed.  So, you were constantly having to rethink things.  So, then the timeout became the middle of the bed, because he knew I couldn’t get to him there, but then he knew he couldn’t get off.  So, you need to be a little bit clever and try to minimize conflict.  If there’re things you don’t want them to touch, you need to get it out of the way.  You really need to safety-proof your house, making sure nothing harmful is in their reach, because you’re not going to be able to rush over there, and grab it out of their hand, and save the day.  You really do need to think ahead, and try and foresee a problem, and avoid it.  I decided to become a homeroom mom when they got to be school-aged. I tried to put on the perception of a normal home, and putting myself out there was like when I was first injured, trying to put on the perception that you’re okay.  Because, if you seem okay, then your kids are going to be okay with the whole situation.  And pushing myself to be homeroom mom, even though I was completely uncomfortable with being there, and handling it, and the questions the kids would ask.  But, in the long run, it normalized everything, and made me not such a different mom than the other moms.  So really, I made an extra effort to really put myself out there and be involved with the school.