One of my favorite quotes on writing is by Jack London who said,
"You can't wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club."
Finishing up our new on-line workshop on adulthood, aging and disability
http://www.spiritlakeconsulting.com/DA/adults/index.html
has taken a bit of clubbing. Don't misunderstand me, there is nothing boring about issues such as the death of a child, growing up with a parent who is schizophrenic or sexuality, social mistakes and disabilities. The challenge is to design this site to do justice to the emotions felt by individuals in those situations.
Writing about children is simpler. All children go to school, no children work, almost all live with their families, none are married, widowed or divorced. Adulthood is different. There are a thousand different paths. Some adults are working. Some wish they were working but afraid they can't do anything well enough to hold a job. And, despite the fond beliefs of social workers that all people with disabilities are just waiting for a chance, the truth is there are some adults in every group who just don't want to work and believe they are entitled to have you support them, based on reasoning I have never been able to figure out.
This workshop also includes issues people don't want to talk about. Obesity is at epidemic proportions and yet almost everyone feels squeamish bringing it up, as if it is insulting to people who need to lose weight. I don't understand why this is at all. The same people usually don't feel embarrassed telling smokers that smoking is bad for them. Do they think the 310-pound woman sitting in the front row doesn't know she is overweight and that it is bad for her health? I would guess she would know it better than you.
Then there is sex. How can a sixty-year-old who has had six children be embarrassed talking about sex? Obviously, if you have six kids you have had sex at least a half-dozen times. I have never met a parent of an adult child with a disability who was not worried about sex - if their child would be taken advantage of, if the parent would end up raising his or her grandkids. With all this concern and thought about it, you would think there would be a desire to discuss sex education, the susceptibility of people with disabilities to sexual abuse and social mistakes surrounding sexuality. This is not one of those cultural misunderstandings that Erich is always talking to me about. I attended Catholic schools back in the 1960's when sex education consisted of three words,
"Don't do it!"
For some reason, all of those lessons failed to take and I grew up believing that the word "vagina" was no dirtier than the word "pancreas" and both were body parts I would be displeased to have to do without.
This workshop is going to be different than our previous ones in that part of it will be lecture and part will be done on-line by the students individually. I bet hundred bucks that Erich and Willy have them do the obesity and sexuality parts on their own.
Now that we have all of the topics selected and some of the pages written, the next step is to find an overarching theme that ties it all together - sex, parenting, self-advocacy, college, learning disabilities, vocational rehabilitation and Alzheimer's. I think I need a bigger club.
"You can't wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club."
Finishing up our new on-line workshop on adulthood, aging and disability
http://www.spiritlakeconsulting.com/DA/adults/index.html
has taken a bit of clubbing. Don't misunderstand me, there is nothing boring about issues such as the death of a child, growing up with a parent who is schizophrenic or sexuality, social mistakes and disabilities. The challenge is to design this site to do justice to the emotions felt by individuals in those situations.
Writing about children is simpler. All children go to school, no children work, almost all live with their families, none are married, widowed or divorced. Adulthood is different. There are a thousand different paths. Some adults are working. Some wish they were working but afraid they can't do anything well enough to hold a job. And, despite the fond beliefs of social workers that all people with disabilities are just waiting for a chance, the truth is there are some adults in every group who just don't want to work and believe they are entitled to have you support them, based on reasoning I have never been able to figure out.
This workshop also includes issues people don't want to talk about. Obesity is at epidemic proportions and yet almost everyone feels squeamish bringing it up, as if it is insulting to people who need to lose weight. I don't understand why this is at all. The same people usually don't feel embarrassed telling smokers that smoking is bad for them. Do they think the 310-pound woman sitting in the front row doesn't know she is overweight and that it is bad for her health? I would guess she would know it better than you.
Then there is sex. How can a sixty-year-old who has had six children be embarrassed talking about sex? Obviously, if you have six kids you have had sex at least a half-dozen times. I have never met a parent of an adult child with a disability who was not worried about sex - if their child would be taken advantage of, if the parent would end up raising his or her grandkids. With all this concern and thought about it, you would think there would be a desire to discuss sex education, the susceptibility of people with disabilities to sexual abuse and social mistakes surrounding sexuality. This is not one of those cultural misunderstandings that Erich is always talking to me about. I attended Catholic schools back in the 1960's when sex education consisted of three words,
"Don't do it!"
For some reason, all of those lessons failed to take and I grew up believing that the word "vagina" was no dirtier than the word "pancreas" and both were body parts I would be displeased to have to do without.
This workshop is going to be different than our previous ones in that part of it will be lecture and part will be done on-line by the students individually. I bet hundred bucks that Erich and Willy have them do the obesity and sexuality parts on their own.
Now that we have all of the topics selected and some of the pages written, the next step is to find an overarching theme that ties it all together - sex, parenting, self-advocacy, college, learning disabilities, vocational rehabilitation and Alzheimer's. I think I need a bigger club.
Leave a comment