The Book Event: I have been invited by our town’s library, The Mark Twain Library, in Redding, Connecticut to present an “author event” and signing next week. This is a new kink to my “parenting adult special needs life” that stretches me a bit outside my comfort zone. But as all parents know and special needs parents are experts at, parenting takes you to places that you never planned on visiting. The event is scheduled for May 15 at 7:30 and I have invited my daughter’s wonderful former case manager, Michele Brabant, to be on hand for the nitty gritty questions that only someone expert on qualifications for government services could possibly answer. I will be signing print books and sharing e-book images of our daughter’s wonderful collages in color that serve as illustrations for the print and e-book.

The book’s focus, as many of you already know, is on our family’s journey over two decades toward creating a safe and happy adulthood for our daughter, with specific concentration on the last twelve months of that journey. Now that our daughter is twenty-three and flourishing in her supervised independent adulthood in a town nearby, I can say without reservation, that we have been successful in reaching that goal.

To underscore that point, our daughter is currently texting me with ecstatic descriptions of her trip to Disney World, along with two staff and her apartment mate. “I don’t want to leave on Friday.” Oh well, even special needs vacations have to come to an end. But what a time she is having, using money that both ladies saved from government funding and supplemented with family contributions for airfare.

So while our daughter learns everything Disney, including the art of animation, I am faltering and fumbling with a new task, how to condense a 550-page book into a short reading and a talk.

Hope you can make it on May 15 and please alert friends in the special needs world who might want to hear how our road to success was achieved.

In another wonderful recognition of the book, the Pegasus Horse Show has invited me to do a book signing on May 18 at the Brewster state of the campus while our daughter and others show their skills in the arena.

©Jill Edelman, M.S.W., L.C.S.W. 2013