I’m no expert on neurodiversity, but I’m surrounded by it daily. Besides teaching for 19 years, I’ve had to learn how to manage my own traumatic brain injury. I have a son (who’s on the Autism spectrum), a daughter (who has ADHD), a dog (with PTSD), two crazy guinea pigs (who have no excuse), four chickens, and a beta fish who watches it all go down from behind glass.
While serving on the mission field in Africa over 20 years ago, I was in a car accident that left me with a TBI and fibromyalgia, among other things. Determined to prove the neurologist wrong, I set out to finish my master’s degree when I returned to the US. I spent 9 years in New Orleans getting my degree from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, my teaching certificate, and a lot of experience along the way. That’s where I met my husband, Thomas, and where I began teaching. We survived Hurricane Katrina and the Saints’ Super Bowl win before moving to Albuquerque (at 8 months pregnant) to start a church.
During the years we spent in Albuquerque, God shaped our family. Our son, who is on the high-functioning end of the Autism spectrum, was born just after we moved. I continued teaching special education, and God ended up directing us out of church planting. Instead, Thomas found his calling in hospital chaplaincy. We spent two years as foster parents, which is how my lovely daughter, who has ADHD, came into our lives.
We currently live in Louisiana, where my husband works in a local hospital. I had no intentions of leaving my classroom, but after 19 years of teaching, I realized in the spring of 2022 that I was no longer able to teach a classroom of students who were medically fragile or needed maximum support on the Autism spectrum. God used my own health problems to remove me from the classroom.
Since I quit teaching, I’ve enjoyed writing the Think A Little Different book series with the help of my own children, sharing my experiences in this blog, and writing curriculum content for LifeWay’s Special Buddies curriculum and others.
