Out of the Ordinary: A Mother's Reflection of Her Emotions on Raising a Disabled Child.

By Cathy Tanner

When you have a child who is disabled you step into a world of unknowns.
When Cathy Tanner’s daughter was younger, she seemed to fit in with peers even though she had down syndrome. There did not seem to be a large cognitive gap between her and other children, and the author began to think that she’d easily navigate having a mentally disabled child.
But as time marched on things began to change. She saw the gap between her daughter’s abilities and those of other children widened. The author struggled to find ways to help her daughter socialize with others so that she would not feel isolated as well as working through her own emotional struggles in raising her.
Through the years of parenting her daughter the author saw God’s providence to provide in multitudes of situations for the author’s emotional well being as well as her daughter’s continued needs.
Join the author as she looks back on raising a daughter with down syndrome and how keeping an open mind and heart while looking to God, has helped her find her way forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664278127

Cathy Tanner

Cathy Tanner has a heart for parents who are walking the journey of raising a disabled child. She earned a master’s degree in guidance and counseling and a Bachelor of Science in exercise science from Samford University. She taught in higher education for over forty years. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama and has been married for forty-two years to her husband, Curtis. She has three children, one of whom has Down Syndrome.

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Just a Note

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I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD be able to raise a disabled child. I was focused on encouraging those who were strong and healthy. When I was in elementary school, I had the best physical education teacher. She was my inspiration to pursue a career in physical education later in my life. While I was in college, I contemplated becoming a doctor and had the opportunity to work in a veteran’s hospital. My job was to wrap the stumps of amputees. This was a difficult job to stomach. The hospital scene was dreary and depressing, and I would rather have worked in a more positive environment. I focused my life on educating people to be healthy and physically fit. I taught at a university for more than thirty-five years in kinesiology.

The birth of my daughter created many challenges to living my life while pursuing a career helping healthy people. Someone referred me to this author’s view below of raising a child with a disability not long after my child was born. The life that I lived after my child was born was not what I was expecting. My life has been deeply challenged emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally. I hope this collection of thoughts, emotions, and raw views of living in my unexpected country will encourage you, validate you, and remind you that you are not alone in your journey.

Welcome To Holland

by Emily Perl Kingsley

Copyright©1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley.

All rights reserved.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this……

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, Welcome to Holland.

Holland?!? you say. What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine, and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Adjustment Is Coming

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IT IS EASY TO BELIEVE something that is not true, especially if you want it to be true. When you have a child who is disabled, there are so many things you want to believe that, in the end, are simply not reality. When my daughter was younger, she seemed to fit in with her peers. She seemed to keep up developmentally with what the other children were doing. There did not seem to be much of a gap between her cognitive abilities and the other children. I wanted to believe that having a mentally disabled child was not particularly bad.

As time moved along, the gap between my daughter’s abilities and those of the other children began to widen. The same thing happened socially. When my daughter was younger, she was