Photo credit: http://www.missyoucandoit.com

If you have HBO On Demand, do yourself a favor and watch a documentary that will capture your attention and melt your heart. If you click on HBO and go to “Documentaries” then “Feature Films,” you’ll find a movie called Miss You Can Do It.

You can watch the trailer here: Miss You Can Do It Trailer

I’m not usually into movies about pageants, and when my husband and I sat down to watch it, I thought, “I hope this isn’t too pageant-y…or too depressing…” Usually, when we do video date night (because you know we’re not going out to the movies), I try and find something funny and light-hearted.

So, for this one, I took a chance. And, yes, I bawled my eyes out–but in a good way! I highly recommend it, for parents of typical children and those with special needs.

I wish that I had been more interested in special needs before I had a child with special needs. Does that sound strange? I feel like I was incredibly closed off from that world, and now I realize that I could’ve gotten involved a long time ago.

If my daughter didn’t have special needs, would I have watched that awesome pageant documentary?

Or this one? Monica and David

Or this one? Best Kept Secret

I can tell you the answer. I probably wouldn’t have watched any of them. I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I think we’re drawn to what we know. And I didn’t know ANYTHING about special needs until July 2011, when Emmy was born.

I know that Oprah loves this quote by Maya Angelou: “When you know better, you do better.”

In my case, I think that it would be: When you know more, you do more.

I’ve stretched my boundaries because I had to. But I’m so glad that I had to because I never would’ve seen what was on the other side.

Over the past few years, I’ve met a fair amount of people who have dedicated themselves to special needs work without having a child, or sister, or brother with special needs. They just did. For various reasons, or perhaps for no reason at all, they wanted to help. I am always touched by those stories. I think I’ve asked almost all of our Early Intervention therapists, “So how did you get into this?” Where did that all start? One therapist told me that, as a teenager, she was helping a friend of the family with her autistic child. I can’t tell you how much that impacted me because I thought back to what I was doing as a teenager and, while I was a good girl :), I wasn’t involved in anything meaningful on that level. I didn’t stretch much out of my comfort zone. One of my goals is to open my children up to a world beyond what they can see. There are many people out there, each with his/her own story to tell. It makes me feel good to finally open my eyes to all of those stories, not just my own.