The Quiet Crisis Next Door

Tag: safety and risk assessment

  • I’ll Take Risk Assessment Over “Singing in the Rain” Any Day…

    I have always loved being out in the rain. I remember as a little girl, riding in the back of my grandfather’s uncovered truck bed as the drops splatted into and around me, M&M’s clutched in my hand, their colors bleeding out and melting, the clouds seemingly reaching down like fingers to wrap around my…

  • How The Silence Breeds

    She was very sorry, she told me…she had lost her temper and yelled at him. A special ed veteran of many years in a generally well-funded district (and a wonderful teacher many had assured me), his developmental preschool teacher herself wasn’t supplied in my opinion with sufficient aids to meet the level of needs present…

  • Key Moments From Our Latest COVID Quarantine

    Andy actually wasn’t the first person in our family to develop symptoms, nor was he the source of our exposure- though he was the only one to be PCR tested because of his job. Two days after I got my new piercings, our sweet Hannah had brief unmasked contact with her boyfriend…who developed symptoms the…

  • The Nightmare of “No”

    “He’s growing so tall! He’s doing so well! He’s being so patient!” We were finishing up a quick trip into a local grocery store this morning with a new ABA behavioral therapist that is working with Tony in the mornings, and those were the cashier’s comments to us. As I have explained before to those…

  • A Little Bit About Article 9…

    Much of my time feels like it’s not really my own right now- paid or unpaid- so I’m going to keep my words and explanations here as stripped down as possible.. A question could be posed after reading last week’s post: why would being a temporary direct care worker covering our son’s habilitation hours increase…

  • Picturing Community Safety

    At the meeting place of Tony’s growth rate, his sensory differences, the profundity of his Autism, his intense impulsivity, and his heavily delayed risk assessment beats the heart of some of my deepest fears for our son’s future. We remain racing against time, have been engaged in every strategy we can think of for years…

  • 365 Days a Year of Things to Fear

    When I was young, our family often watched reruns of The Twilight Zone. Black and white memories of commonplace scenes twisting through sometimes terrifying deviations floating through the time warp of a 43 year old mind- faces and images frozen in grief or compounding horror. We are taught to think there is a firm line…