AUTHOR ' S corner
Jordan Rosenfeld
Jordan is the author of four writing guides and three novels. Her articles
have been published in such places as: Alternet, The Atlantic, Marin
Magazine, the New York Times, the Petaluma Magazine, Salon, the
San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post and many more.
Anthology Lifts up Families
of Special Needs Children
F
or over nineteen years, Hollister
author and education specialist,
Ramona Trevino, has worked to
offer a safe and loving educational space
for many families with children
of special needs.
Working with these children has felt
like a part of her calling and purpose,
she said. “God gave me the heart so
that people could trust me to take care
of their kids.”
After publishing a book about over-
coming PTSD under the pseudonym
I.M. Dauntless, she decided to lift
up the voices of the families whose
children she has taught over the years
in a second book, an anthology titled
Blossoms of My Life. In it, nine mothers
share their stories of life with their
special needs children (all of whom are
grown now), and how they dealt with
their challenges.
“I want this book to give inspiration
and support to parents when they learn
their child has special needs,” Trevino
said. “It’s a life-changing event, and it’s
not the way you intended life to be, but
it’s going to be okay.”
“When a family receives the news
that their child has special needs, it can
come as a great shock,” said Sherrean
Carr, Dean of Career Education at
Gavilan College in Gilroy. Carr’s
daughter, Taylor, has special needs.
Her story is included in the anthology.
“You go through a grief process
because the child you thought was, is
not,” Carr said.
When Carr’s daughter, now 23 years
old, was born perfect and beautiful
after an uneventful pregnancy and
92
labor, Carr and her husband had no
idea that anything was wrong.
It wasn’t until Carr witnessed what
she thought was a seizure while her
newborn daughter was nursing that she
sought medical advice at the hospital.
The doctor almost wrote them off,
however, because on the outside, Taylor
looked perfectly normal. But when her
daughter had a seizure in front of the
doctor, he needed no more convincing.
“That’s where the odyssey of the
black hole of devastation began,” Carr
said.
For a time, medication helped but
eventually, the seizures returned. An
MRI revealed that Taylor’s brain had
not formed correctly in utero. She was
diagnosed with what is called “neuronal
migration anomaly with poly-micro-
gyria,” Carr explained.
The doctors did not know exactly
how this diagnosis would impair Taylor
and told Carr they would have to wait
and see if she either met her develop-
mental milestones or didn’t.
As a result of her disability, Taylor
has impaired motor skills and a
severe seizure disorder, and she is
non- ambulatory and non-verbal. She
swallows but cannot chew. She does not
have high functioning of her hands and
legs. And cognitively, her mother said,
she is around the age of a toddler.
Despite all that, “Taylor is very
communicative,” Carr said.
Using modified American Sign
Language (ASL), pointing and
vocalizations, she gets her point across.
“She’s brilliant. She has about two
dozen signs,” Carr said.
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
june/july 2019
Carr remembers the bleak early days
of grappling with Taylor’s diagnosis and
the reality of her constant need for care.
Carr’s mother-in-law provided essential
care in the early years, so that both
Carr and her husband could return
to work.
But the emotional turning point for
Carr came a few weeks after she came
home from the hospital. “I was lying in
the Barcalounger with my hand over
my eyes, when my dad came by and
said, kindly, ‘Still feeling sorry for your-
self, hon?’ Well that struck a chord.”
Carr decided in that moment that
their lives would not revolve around
her daughter’s disabilities. “I said,
she will have to fold into our lives.
I worked hard for a career and college.
I had things I wanted to do.”
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