Good morning, DAB family,
Thank you all for upholding the life-giving spirit of this ministry by lifting others when they have need. I consider it a blessing to lift you in prayer. Doing so blesses me, also.
2015 has been unbelievably hard for my family, but, if I'm being honest, we've been in some manner of freefall for several years. 2015 just brought it all out into the humbling light for everyone to see. I recognize the blessing in that transparency. I praise God for it. Our needs and brokenness, however, feel too overwhelming to manage for much longer. I seek prayer for the following challenges.
We have a beautiful special needs child and the scope of her needs are only beginning to become clear for us. She has significant challenges with eating, toileting, sleeping, social interactions, and sensory input of most kinds. Accommodating and working with each of these challenges is exhausting, expensive, and time-intensive. It has required my giving up income-earning work to stay home with her. It has meant social isolation for both of us. And the cost of special foods, supplements, diapers/training pants, and 4 hours a week of respite care for her is more than we can actually afford.
The difficulty of our situation has driven a wedge into already long-strained relations between my husband and I, and our daughter's needs have left no room for any kind of togetherness or intimacy effort for the two of us. I have a chronic autoimmune illness that was triggered by the pregnancy and that has also become worse over the last nearly three years due to exhaustion, stress, loneliness, lack of sufficient self-care, lack of sleep, etc. The realities of my life have made it impossible most days to take care of myself. Even a little bit. And I know that in order to be a good parent to my daughter I have to maintain my health and stability. I also know that she needs to grow up seeing that other people besides her have needs so that she will learn compassion and self-sacrifice.
All of this has led me to bring my daughter to live with my grandmother in a city two hours from where my husband works. The extra hands that my grandmother offers have literally been life-saving for me as my health has been crashing, but it has wreaked further devastation on my marriage.
Our finances are so perilous at this point that it feels essential that I go back to work. But our daughter isn't ready to be mainstreamed into daycare and preschool. The feeding and toileting, not to mention the sensory issues, are still big obstacles. The whole situation feels hopeless and endlessly stressful to our family. My husband and I want to reconcile. We want to take good care of our daughter and at least reasonable care of ourselves. We want to be able to live in the same town and, ideally, the same home. Our efforts thus far don't seem to be fruitful.
I humbly and sincerely ask for prayer for all of these things for my family. We are in crisis. Financial crisis. Marital crisis. Health crisis. And crisis in terms of our daughter's needs and ensuring that they're met. I pray for the strength to keep going and to see the blessings when they come, to be grateful for them, and to know what to ask our Heavenly Father for.
With gratitude,
latemommy
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