I grew up as a caregiver. My father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when he was 29 in 1959. I was 2 at the time and can’t remember seeing my father walking. Dad lived in our home until 1983, when Mom made the difficult decision to move him to a nursing home. He lived there until 1997 when he died at age 67, the youngest resident of the nursing home and the one who’d lived there the longest.

A year before Dad moved to the nursing home, my husband and I welcomed our first child, Allen, into the world. A few hours after his delivery, doctors discovered he had a life-threatening birth defect, and he was immediately flown to the University of Nebraska in Omaha for surgery. 2 days later, we finally arrived at the neonatal intensive care unit where he was recovering. 700 miles from home, without friends or family, we felt utterly and completely alone.

Allen survived and is an adult now, but our experiences created a deep desire within me to reach out to parents of critically or chronically ill children. So after 25 years as an elementary teacher who welcomed kids with special needs into her classroom, I left teaching in 2003 to begin writing and speaking. My first book, A Different Dream for My Child: Meditations for Parents of Critically or Chronically Ill Children, was released in 2009 by Discovery House Publishers (DHP). Since then I’ve published 4 more books for the special needs community. The most recent is Does My Child Have PTSD? What to Do When Your Child Is Hurting from the Inside Out, which came out in October of 2015. Check out my books page to view the rest.