By Dana Meijler for Kveller
Summer vacation is upon us.
All over Facebook I see statuses of parents dealing
with school being out. Grateful posts about not having to pack lunches quickly
turn into posts about the hassles of shlepping kids to baseball practice or kids
being underfoot saying, “I’m bored” 600 times a day and in between happy
vacation photos and day trips and amusements parks. In other words, the stuff of life. Or at least the stuff of life when you are a parent.
As the parent of a special needs child, I recognize these irritations but honestly, I also do my share of eye rolling when I read stuff like this. It’s tough not to shake my head when some parents’ biggest problems are that they cannot decide how many pairs of flowered underpants their kids need to pack to go to Jewish sleep-away camp for two weeks. It sometimes makes me cringe when I read stuff like this, not just because I think of friends who struggle financially and aren’t in the position to be able to pay to send their child to be cared for by others for two weeks. Or those, like me, whose kids just can’t participate in things like summer camp, because their needs are so specialized and they just need more attention and care than they can get in most summer programs.
Look, it would be great if I could be a bigger person. I don’t begrudge anyone anything but when I read that someone’s biggest challenge is whether to buy the BMW SUV or the Escalade and this is presented like Sophie’s Choice in the blogosphere, without one word of gratitude for the position they’re in, it’s hard to take what they have to say seriously.
I suppose this means I am not a bigger person, okay. Well, I can live with that.
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