The house is quiet except the rapid thud and clack my fast-moving fingers make on the laptop keyboard. I should be in bed, but after a weekend of ignoring this machine, it's catch-up time. Three days worth of unanswered emails and I find myself angry. Having just sent a sarcastic and not-so-nice email to a woman I've never met–a speech therapist at the mega-research university. She is trying to help. And I retort with a lid opened on a 6-year resentment that grew over time about said university which kept cutting us from services for which the wallet of a man–my daughter's father, to whom I'm not longer married–bled. We became one of those families that mortgaged their home two and three times to pay for the services out of pocket that insurance refused to cover and of which the public schools could not provide enough. The country's leading university speech program told us they could offer us any more speech services at age eight–when my daughter was (and still is) not conversational. Another university arm told us we were not high functioning enough to continue attending an autism social skills camp. We waited anxiously as we aged out of more and more summer camps and opportunities until we became 16, only to learn that we no longer qualified for another camp. It had become a camp only for those who were on the college track. College track for those with Intellectual Disabilities, that is. Yet, our ID is too severe to qualify for that program. And now that camp, for which we anxiously waited–we no longer qualify.

We are among 30,000 people needing help from our state. Yet, we are lucky enough to have the mandatory dual diagnosis of ID to even be on that list. My daughter could have been born with a physical condition that rendered her incontinent, unable to feed herself and in a wheel chair, yet smart as a whip. It happens. Yet, without the ID designation, we would not qualify to be on that 30,000-person wait list. So, we dream of state services, which fraught with a litany of bureaucratic-induced problems, but can also sometimes be very good. Yet, because we are not about to be homeless and I'm not not dead, we'll keep waiting.

Have I become one of them? I used to fear and avoid them. Those parents who had older children that seemed bitter because they didn't have enough services back then and were at the precipice of a black hole of adulthood with no life support system to bolster them. We are only 16, but it's true what they said. We left early intervention and left a plethora of services when, at three, we entered the federal system and on we ventured into our elementary years. We'd have to lobby for minimal speech and OT to continue in public school when we entered the middle years. And now in high school I have very little connection with what goes one in the arena of those same auxiliary services. Who's fault is that? Not all theirs. I. Am. Tired.

I have become one of those. And now, I realize my judgments were karmic. (That's happening more often now.) Guess that's why the christian Holy Book says Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged.

This summer I got a glimpse of something scary. It's called the sofa. And my daughter was on it. Too much of the time. For the first time in her journey, my optimism is melting into fear as I see the reality that is here in Tennessee. Dang. Stupid me. All those conferences I attended about what could be? That was in other states. Not number 49 on the list of worst disAbility service provisions.

More. Later. I am Tired. But…Don't. Think. For one minute as you read this post composed in a funk…that I'm giving up. No such luck.