Thanks for your amazing and highly thoughtful post, Egon. I’m also disappointed in many here on this thread. Not everything is a “conservative” pull yourself up by your bootstraps, son, type of issue.
Special needs parents are anything but whiners ...yes, the kid looks happy, but I’m sure his day to day life is likely a constant as well as costly struggle.
It’s one thing to denigrate whiny women who have nothing really to whine about ....but THESE mothers have something to whine about ...something that is QUITE difficult to bear at times. Add to it an absent or spouse that has deserted you (which happens as often as up to 80% of marriages like thse) and you get something that most MEN couldn’t handle for one day.
Lemme tell you about Egon:
Before his family knew they had an autistic child, in a small old-fashioned country school where ALL the kids played on the playground at the same time, and there was only ONE impaired (retarded) kid in the bunch of about 43, he was the first to defend her from teasing and turned the tide in her favor without any adult supervision OR SPECIFIC TRAINING from home, per se.
God knew what He was doing when He blessed Egon’s family with a disabled kid — and I don’t remember whether that was before or after that little guy was “on deck,” but it was certainly before the family knew we had a needy fella on board this Lifeboat.