Life with children and disabilities is a never ending story.  Without the history in my family of any types of disabilities I was thrown into this realm by my children that I adopted.  As they were growing all these “challenges” were evolving.  As my children were growing, so were the different aspects of the disabilities in the world.  Non Verbal Learning was just being investigated.  Remember those kids when you were growing up in the 60’s that we said were plain obnoxious?  Well they had a learning disability and no one knew.  The reason I say a never ending story is because my first child, my daughter, was making very good inroads to college and understanding her disability, until a Navy boy thought it would be in his best interest to have her elope with him.  I was lucky she got her first year of school under her belt, but she did elope.  She made a momentary decision that “love” was the be all end all, and he was being transferred and now married to my daughter would not go overseas.  Yes, this was a total shock after all the hard work and fighting I did to get her where she was.  In going through my brain I could not understand when I went wrong as a Mother.  Since I was not brought up by a very nurturing person, one who was impulsive herself, these were the things I wanted to do for my daughter.  So not being able to find a solution in my brain, I sought psychiatric help,  I am working with a great therapist who gives me strategies to deal with my daughter.  Since my daughter’s elopement, she has not enrolled in school, told me she was investigating it, moved to a different state and does not work.  None of which I am in approval of.  My therapist gave me the name of a great book “Brainstorm” by Daniel J Siegel, MD.  This is about when adolescence begins and really ends.  Yes, it’s in the brain and it does not end until the brain stops growing until the age of 24!  OMG I have to wait that long!  Well the good part is that we all have gone through this process and the decisions that we make are not right or wrong.  They mold how we make decisions or walk the next steps of our lives.  It molds our direction for decisions in our future lives.  

Now my daughter is in full swing of this  adolescence phase.  It is really scary to think that the decisions she is making right now, and they are hers, will mold the person she is becoming,  World watch out, it scares me.  At this age, 19 the knowledge that children have is minimal and they are making monumental decisions with their lives.  This is not like it was decades ago, The world is a very scary place, it’s more difficult to make a living, let alone getting money for school.  

So my husband wait at home and find out all these monumental decisions these young people are making.  I wish they would listen to us when we say, “Choose wisely, it comes back to haunt you”.  Boy does it!  But as anyone who is reading this blog will understand, no one listens, but when the brain stops growing let’s see what happens!