About 2 years ago, way before we were asked to join in on this wonderful blog, Kay Marner and I decided to do a book together. One of my job-jobs is as publisher of DRT Press, a teeny weeny publishing company that I formed in 2004 to publish children’s books on adoption. Kay had sent me a manuscript that I wasn’t able to publish, but we’d become virtual acquaintances and kept in touch over the years. We have a couple of things in common: my son, Little J, was adopted from Russia, and her daughter, Natalie, was adopted from Ukraine at about the same time. We both have older, biological children – brothers to our adopted kids, and both Little J and Natalie have similar behaviors and diagnoses, and both of us shared stresses and worries and feelings about our unique children through our on-line friendship – stresses and worries and feelings that were hard to share with parents of neurotypical children who were our friends in our “real” lives.
Kay and I got to typing, and she suggested that we do some kind of project to help parents like us understand that we were not alone. It was really, really hard parenting kids with behavioral issues like ours, and we felt that that simple message - there are other people out there who feel the same way that you do – was one that would resonate in our community of special needs parents.
We wanted the essays to be written by regular old parents (as opposed to parents who were professional writeds). We didn’t want sicky-sweet I learned and grew so much from my wonderful angel baby pieces. We wanted real, honest, true, stories about people bringing up children who were so easy to love (they are our babies, after all), but so hard to raise.
That’s how Easy to Love but Hard to Raise: Real Parents, Challenging Kids, True Stories was born! And we’re super pleased to announce that it’s almost ready to go to press and has a tentative “due date” (publishing date) of October, 2011. It started as a book about parenting kids with ADHD, and has grown to include parenting issues when dealing with Sensory Processing Disorder, juvenile bipolar, OCD, autism, and a variety of other challenges for parents.
Penny, Pam, and I (all bloggers here at A Mom's View of ADHD) all have essays in the book (along with 20 or so other parent/writers as well as 15 or so experts) and Kelly and Tammy have provided anecdotal bits. Kay has done the majority of heavy lifting in editing the book (yay, Kay!).
And of course, what modern book would exist without an accompanying blog. If you’ve read this far and you’re interested, please head over to Easy to Love but… and subscribe to blog posts and “like” us on Facebook. We have a wonderful set of parent-bloggers – just like we have here at A Mom’s View of ADHD, but we're a little different: we are representative of a wide range of diagnoses and co-morbidities, and we also try to focus on the parenting end of things. Of course, you can't have parents without children, so there will be talk about them, as well, but we really want to be an honest forum about what it's like to be a person dealing with a child whose particular challenges go way beyond the norm.
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Adrienne Ehlert Bashista lives in central North Carolina with her husband and 2 boys, ages 8 and 11. Her interest in ADHD comes from parenting her youngest child, who has that diagnosis as well as a couple of other co-morbid conditions. Read more about entrepreneurship, writing, children’s books, and a bunch of other stuff at on her blog. You can also read about her adventures parenting and homeschooling her youngest child at her other blog: A Square Peg, A Round Hole.