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My family has always been one that gets together for games—we play board
games, TV game shows, and card games. It’s just a way for us to spend time
together inexpensively and in a way that encourages teamwork, family time
and critical thinking.
Sometimes, though, in the heat of the moment, the competition gets ugly, and
often what has kept us off the evening news is a simple rule: The card laid
is the card played.
Roughly translated, it means that you play what you’re dealt and once you
play it, there’s no turning back. It’s a done deal.
Just like becoming a parent.
Whether you skip the labor pains and adopt, or you go through nine months of
morning sickness and grow them the old-fashioned way, you raise the kids you
get.
My brother was born with a club foot, and one of our more insensitive
neighbors wondered out loud to my mom, “What did you do to deserve this? Why
was he born that way?”
Careless, cruel, and in my mind, completely irrelevant.
When my husband and I decided to adopt, everyone wanted to know why. "Can’t
you have any of your own? Why not just keep trying? Why not foreign
adoption? Why DFACS?"
Then, after our daughter arrived, we got tons of different questions: Why is
she like that? Why isn’t she with her parents? Why are you so strict?
And when life in our home with our daughter became especially difficult,
people wondered why we didn’t just give her back.
A close friend of mine, an insulin-dependent diabetic, just gave birth to a
beautiful son. People kept asking her why she was risking her health for her
child.
My answer to all of these questions is this: It doesn’t matter. Life is a
game, and we play whichever version of it happens to be on the table, with
whatever hand is dealt to us.
Becoming the tenth set of parents to a six-year old was the game we chose,
and we’re playing it the best we can, just like my mom did, just like my
friend is doing now, just like all of you.
We do the best we can with what we have. Would we like to do better? Of
course! All good parents constantly wonder and question whether they are
doing everything they can. Luckily, Parent-to-Parent is around to help us
interpret the rules and help us become better players.
When Bill and I started out, we had nowhere to turn for help. Life with our
daughter at her worst was a bad, made-for-TV movie, and no one, not even our
closest friends and family members, could help.
We swore to ourselves that if we survived, we would someday help people in
the same position, people who were dedicated to parenting—to playing the
game—but needed some help with the rules and strategies to help them win.
We aren’t experts. You won’t see us on the World Poker Tour, or on Who Wants
to be a Millionaire. But if you call P2P looking for help with Oppositional
Defiant Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, or difficult adoptive
situations, you may end up talking to us because we are playing those games,
have won a few rounds, and have decided to go into coaching.
Parenting a difficult child and helping others who do is another part of our
game, another card we can play, and we are definitely here to help other
“players” succeed.
After all, some games require teamwork to win, and parenting is definitely
one of those games.
BIO:
Tracy Consani Saunders is a mom and high school English teacher who is
constantly amazed at the amount of patience she and her husband Bill have
developed in their three years since becoming parents. She can be reached at
peachyteacher@bellsouth.net
if you have comments or questions.
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There is an
energy in us which makes things happen when the paths of other persons touch
ours.
from the Monks of Weston Priory
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