@ Home in the World

So, yeah, I'm a writer!

Today was a big day for me. Huge in fact.

And the funny thing is - there may be no one in my real life who gets this.

But I should take it back a couple of steps. This blog has been pretty light for over a year. I have been looking back at the archives and not seeing all that much. Both trips to Washington that we took this year have gone largely unwritten, and while I've had a few good posts around going to BlogHer I haven't really done much to follow up on my experience there.

I've been working. Working really hard, and enduring a beastly commute that has pretty much sucked the life out of me. I loved my work, the company I worked for, and the people I worked with, but I couldn't keep up. All the while I was reading about all the other bloggers who have been doing things online, travelling, and having really good experiences to write about. I was hard not to be depressed and resentful about it.

Meanwhile, I turned 45 a couple of months ago. I had thought that I would be back in graduate school by then, or maybe even done, but no. I was working. My job, much as I loved it, was not going to allow for me to take on anything extra - don't get me wrong, they would have totally covered tuition for anything I work related, but I was having trouble matching my real interests to anything that would benefit the company, and really, I didn't have time for anything extra.  Meanwhile, my vision for what the job could be wasn't exactly bearing fruit. Admittedly, it was a bit of a fuzzy vision, and I'm sure that was part of the problem.

I left that job a couple of weeks ago. It's a big step for me, because I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do next, I have flooded the market with resumes, and have gotten a few bites, but they are all largely the same kind of job. I'm finding that the things I'm drawn to these days have more to do with social media or educational technology than instructional design.

Around the same time I left the company, I got a message from my friend PunditMom inviting me to post for her new project. I told her I'd be going to a volunteer event for Elizabeth Warren, and offered to write about it. Then she asked for a bio.

Now normally that wouldn't be such a big deal, but I'm at a crossroads here. How to describe myself at this point in transition? And, possibly, more importantly, do I use my real name? 

I hemmed and hawed about it for over a week. I'm sure my husband is tired of hearing about it, because although he's not really pushed me in one direction or another, when I was about to hit the send button, I announced, "Okay, here goes, I'm going to go with my real name..." he said "It's about time."

All right then.

This morning, I put the Warren post up thinking that it might go live tomorrow, but before I could even send her the photo from the event, she tweeted about the post. It was up! I had an inkling that the Warren campaign might catch it, and this afternoon, they did. It got retweeted to 30K followers. As if that weren't enough, a few hours later EMILY's list picked it up and tweeted it.

And that's not even thinking about having had it tagged on Facebook.

I've just got laugh. I've been writing online under one nom de plume or another for over a decade. This was my very first post using my real name, and a nationwide outfit like EMILY's list has picked it up.

If that isn't a sign from the Universe, I don't know what is.

 

A Candle, and Not a Flag

**Note: This post is from last year. My attempts at writing something more meditative than angry for the 10th year anniversary are, thus far, not going well. The anger is still valid, but I will save it for another day.

I could tell you where I was, what I was doing, what I first thought, and how we were all sent home just in case. I could tell you that the only time the reality of it hit me was when someone on a crowded train home told me that 300 police and firefighters were trapped in the building that collapsed. But really, what I remember of that day hardly matters.

Since I was in Boston, and not in New York, since I had no friends or relatives in any of the buildings, or aboard any of the planes, there isn't much of a story to tell.

This year it snuck up on me. Sure, I've got plenty going on, but I think the real reason is that there isn't feeling that the anniversary is being used for political gain. We have a new president now, one who is not a "War President" even though we are still at war. The focus is returning to where it should be, not on the politics or the President, but on the people who died that day and the families they left behind.

Of course, the politics aren't gone entirely. There were so many rude and inappropriate comments left on an editorial about a national day of service that Boston.com had to shut down the comments for the piece. Apparently, being asked to do something for the people around you is unthinkable. And all of that is without going to the overtly political sites, who have their own questions and objections.

I wonder if and when we will reach the point that 9/11 is like December 7; a day to be remembered, but no longer so fraught with political overtones. It's hard to say whether 9/11 really changed the country, or if our reaction to it did.

When we remember September 11, I wish we could also recall September 13. Before we mistook revenge for justice, and Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden; before the flag stood for belligerence and machismo, and before it was co-opted for a single party. Two days after the attacks, the nation stood together in candlelight vigil to honor the dead and comfort each other, and that, we should never forget. 

I'm not alone. You're not, either.

One of my goals for going to Blogher11 was to sit in on the Special Needs Mini-Conference.

Prior to this, I had never really identified as a special needs blogger and somedays I don't really identify as a special needs mom. Over the years however, I have come to realize how others who have had the experience of raising an adopted child - particularly, but not always, one adopted internationally - were drawn to one another at gatherings. More recently I have noticed the vast difference in my personal comfort level in the company of mothers with special needs children. These women have seen it all. A temper tantrum here, an unusual mannerism or several, an aversion to transtions, a sensitivity to the seemingly innocuous, a vocabulary of strange sounds - these parents try to help or they nod in recognition - but they don't judge.

Beyond seeking the company of others who had "been there," I can't say that I had any specific expectations of the extended session except to learn how people, beside those I was already reading, handled this topic. Mir and Christy, for instance, handle it with particular grace; something I have to assume is partly an extension of their personalities, and partly their writing talents. I was also intrigued by the notion, in the session blurb, that we were telling a story that no one wants to hear.

Well, maybe no one outside the special needs community, but as we are learning, that community is a whole lot bigger than people think. The fairly large room at this one conference was filled with people, and this was just one subset of a conference of people who called themselves writers or bloggers. Imagine how big the population outside this one room could be and what we could learn from each other.

It turned out that one of the things author Rob Rummel-Hudson was talking about was advocacy - writing and talking about what it's like to raise a child with special needs when the people around you, who haven't experienced what you are going through, want mostly to avert their eyes. Aurelia Cotta spoke about the people around her not wanting to hear how medication worked for her and how people compared her to a drug addict. Someone in the audience mentioned that she struggled with the hopeful but impossibly high expectations of her relatives for her preemie daughter when the future was far from certain.

At our tables we talked about what and how much we shared about our children or ourselves on our blogs and in real life. How much do the people outside of our immediate lives need to know? Particularly for those with so-called invisible disabilities, how much do we need to explain their behaviors?  How much will they hold against us? Why are each of these encounters and the decisions associated with them so much more of a struggle?

Interestingly, I found myself once again at that scary intersection between my public life and my semi-anonymous blog, and the more we talked and I listened, the more I realized how many dimensions there were to the struggle of parents, including one I have spent much of my life defending - the public school.   Before I knew it, I was standing and speaking and addressing something I have never really discussed on this blog - I outed myself as an elected School Board member.

I am and I have been for the last ten years, a local school board member. I got involved out of a lifetime interest in education, educational technology, and educational policy. I have worked my way through nine budget seasons cognizant of the tension between the cost of special education services and the pressure they put on the rest of the school, I have learned more and can go on and on about how to run a school, what works and what doesn't, what we as a society should have but aren't willing to pay for.

I have sat in on countless IEP meetings as a parent and wondered what it would be like if every student got this kind of attention instead of the half-hour parent/teacher conference twice a year, but the national conversation about education seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction. I have involved myself in countless discussions online about the conflict of reformers who act as though we aren't demanding enough from our teachers and simultaneously maintain that they are overpaid because any idiot can teach. I have argued with people who simply do not recognize the presence of special needs students in their calculations of what makes a successful school, or worse, claim that special ed services are simply a ploy by union members to increase their numbers. What I have found most disturbing though, is the more recent tendency of people, who were once only against mainstreaming, to assert that our scant educational resources should go to those who have the best chance of being productive members of society.

This sentiment has only been escalated by the rise of the Tea Party. Many of those who once feared that such arguments would meet with disapproval for their very selfishness are afraid no more. They speak of our children as a burden for which they should not have to be responsible.

And so, I stood in that conference room and identified myself and advocated for advocacy. Because this fight is going to get worse before it gets better, but it's not a fight any of us has to face alone.