For many jobs, the ability to deal with failure is a skill necessary for success. Hank Aaron is in the Hall of Fame and is the all time leader in home runs. On the way to that success, he made 8,593 outs.
Every trauma surgeon has some patients die on the operating table. The clients of public defenders often end up either pleading guilty or being convicted of a crime. To be successful, people in those professions must learn to deal with failure.
It has been my observation that successful people in such professions define some outcomes that may on the surface seem like as failure as successes.
Hank Aaron may have felt that a one for four with a home run was a successful game. A trauma surgeon whose efforts extend the life of a very badly injured patient for even a short while can take pride in the result. A public defender who negotiates a plea to reduce the time a client will spend in jail has won, even if the client goes away for years.
My guess is that something of the sort is necessary for people like Martha Pryor of Oklahoma. While reading some newspapers, I found the following:
Meet a 7-year-old boy who waits:J is blonde with blue eyes. He is about 4 feet tall and weighs about 70 pounds.
Loving and affectionate, J likes to please others. He is an active and energetic boy, who likes to be outside, where he can ride his go-cart or tractor. He is currently trying to improve his athletic skills, and likes being the bat boy on his foster brother's baseball team.J is a good eater. He especially likes pizza and chicken nuggets. He requires help with hygiene and does need "pull-ups" at night.
J has no ongoing health problems. He is diagnosed with mental retardation. His IQ has been tested at 40, showing moderate mental retardation. He also is autistic. J has delays in motor skills and appears to lack coordination. He also has difficulties with language. He does not speak in full sentences and uses very few words.
J is in the first grade. He is in special education, where he receives speech, occupational and physical therapy. His biggest problem is a very short attention span. J has been diagnosed with ADD and takes medication to help his concentration level. J also does not have a sense of danger and will engage in dangerous activities without thinking about the consequences. He requires close supervision.
Anyone wanting to learn more about adopting this child or any of the children throughout the state in need of a safe and loving environment can call DHS adoption specialist Martha Pryor at (580) 490-6060 or (877) OK-SWIFT.
Although there are people with enough love in their hearts and enough selflessness to volunteer to help special need children, I suspect that Martha Pryor has more kids seeking a family than volunteers seeking to adopt mentally retarded or autistic kids. My guess is that a large percentage of such kids are never adopted.
People in Martha Pryor’s job have to gain sufficient satisfaction from finding loving homes for a few of the special needs kids to make up for the inability to locate homes for all of the kids.
The same is true of raising an autistic child. It is a hard job. The successes are all too infrequent. It is very important to define each small step forward as a success and to relish each such success. The successes may be small and infrequent but they are the only things allowing the defeats to be endured
Here's a small piece of public success.
Good for the families of California's mentally disabled who stood up to Schwarzenegger and forced him to back away from his proposal to freeze "future enrollments in the rapidly growing and increasingly expensive programs at current levels of about 185,000 recipients. He also had proposed creating waiting lists for newcomers, such as newborn babies with Down's syndrome."
These families, like Dwight describes, have a long haul. They deserve our support, and they deserve congratulations for winning a round against the cruel wind that blowing through our country.