I forgot all about this park
until I just came across an article about it. Thanks, Arc Circle of Family and Friends!
It’s called Morgan’sWonderland, located in Texas, and it’s designed for kids and people with
disabilities to enjoy. It’s a place where special needs kids and able-bodied
siblings can have fun together. Families can have meaningful quality time that
everybody can enjoy. It has some great
features and it’s very inexpensive. Anybody in the disabled community knows
that when you add the word “special”, or any variant of it, to something it
automatically boosts the cost of the product or service by at least 20%. Not
here. One-day passes for adults: $15; kids: $10: special needs: $0. Can't get much better than that!
I read an article about it
in Family Circle. This choked me up when I
read it:
"Before the park, I had to sit back and watch everyone else play," says 18-year-old Miguel Castro of San Antonio, who has spina bifida and is in a wheelchair. He celebrated his 17th birthday party at the park. "If I had to pick a favorite ride, it would be the swings. I hadn't been on one since I was 2 or 3 years old, and didn't really remember what it felt like," says Miguel. "Now I can go on them whenever we visit, and have fun like everyone else. It means everything to me."
Can you imagine not being
able to remember what it felt like to be on a swing because your body wouldn't
allow you to get into one after the age of 2 or 3? How many times did you play at the park or on the
school grounds for recess with your friends? Did you slide down a huge slide or
sit in the tire swing with a couple of buddies and spin, spin, spin till you
got so dizzy you almost threw up? Did you play tag and chase each other on the
monkey bars? In elementary school, we called the playground equipment “the big
toy”. I have lots of awesome memories from playing on that thing.
My daughter has never and
WILL never be able to play on a big toy. She can’t get on those swings or go up
and down that slide even though she really, really wants to. I don’t even go
anywhere where she would be watching other kids screaming in delight on one because
of the torture on her face. If you think I’m exaggerating, take your own kid,
niece, nephew, neighbor’s kid, whoever, to a park, sit them right in front of it and tell
them they can watch from their seat but they can’t get up and they can’t go
play.
That all sounds depressing,
doesn’t it? I just keep in mind that it’s only one thing she can’t do. But I
often wonder what the heck I’m gonna do when my son gets old enough to want to
go to the park. I can’t NOT let him go; I can’t take the girl. The only thing I
can figure is I will have to have separate play dates with my own kids!
I wonder what other parents
of kids with and without disabilities do in these situations??
Well, Adam had his near drown when he was 12 and was a AAA hockey goalie, baseball all-star, girlfriend and rest of the backpack. Life changed as we knew it. After the first year, old friends disappeared, family never appeared, school focused on his paraprofessional. I could never take him back to his old haunts, in fact we eventually moved 150 miles away. Mom and Dad, his therapists and daily bodywork are his life, much to my dismay a hospital bed and old movies he liked before the accident are his friends. It tears you apart and it's a wound that never heals. I just have to focus on being his best friend, always there; hopefully the other stuff won't matter. Tough topic!!
ReplyDeleteYes, very tough. I think people who are not in this situation don't realize how much it affects the parents, too.
DeleteSome get scared off because they "don't know what to say". Wouldn't it be nice if they could even just say that sometimes rather than drop off the face of the earth completely?
I'm grateful that Adam was given to parents like you & your wife.