Valley Low

These past few evenings have definitely felt like "givin' up days".  "Givin' up days" is a phrase that singer/songwriter, Kirk Franklin eloquently coined in a song on one of his more recent albums.  We all have them.  You know, the days that you don't want to pursue your goals and aspirations anymore because it all feels so pointless.  Or the days that you question your faith and wonder if God has become distracted with someone else's life and taken His hands off of the steering wheel of yours.  I know that God is still with us, but the daily struggle is sometimes overwhelming.  Take the past two evenings.  All of my weeknight evenings are spent monitoring or helping my daughter while she completes her homework, attempting to prepare dinner, and trying (often in vain) to get a head start on preparing for the next day.  I often feel as if I'm being pulled in 20 directions at once!  The homework struggles are the most difficult.  Parenting a child with special needs is hard, but the hardest part is, perhaps, seeing the looks of despair, frustration and hopelessness on my daughter's face as she attempts to complete her nightly assignments.  She wants to "get it", but it often just doesn't "click" for her.  So night after night we chunk information and repeat it, hoping that she will be able to remember it by the end of the week.  Some of it, she remembers and the rest is forgotten by the time her tests and quizzes are given.  I hug her because I feel her sadness and in the next minute I become frustrated with her because she seems to intentionally do the exact opposite of everything that I ask her to do!  Is it noncompliance or incompetence?  It's becoming more and more difficult to tell.
I'm beginning to wonder if her current school placement is right for her.  The teacher/student ratio is great - 9 students to 1 teacher.  The curriculum, on the other hand, is fast-paced and a little advanced.  My daughter doesn't get A's, but she manages to keep her head above water.  "But at what cost?", I've been asking myself lately.  I will not allow her self-esteem and confidence to be trampled while she struggles to keep pace at school.  There doesn't seem to be a school in our area that is really a good fit for her.  The large class sizes at the public middle school would be too much for her.  My daughter's gullibility and social immaturity would also make her an easy target there.  Tuition costs at private schools for children with special learning challenges are astronomical, placing them far out of our reach.  So for now, we will fight on and try to get through the rest of the school year taking it one day at a time.