Part of my reason for starting Milestones&IceCreamCones was to share the journey I am on with my son.  He is 8 years old and has developmental apraxia of speech as well as sensory issues, attentional challenges and extreme anxiety.  I thought I possibly had a unique perspective, being both the mother of a child with a developmental speech delay (among the other issues) and a speech therapist.  However, my main motivation was to encourage women to address all the things that we don’t talk about: anxiety, loss, how hard it is being a mother (and how that does NOT mean that we don’t treasure our children), the different challenges we have with our children, the struggles we face in our various roles and capacities.  I feel like there is so much that we just don’t say.  Why do we hide that which is hard?  Difficulty is not failure.  Being honest about difficulty is not failure.  Needing help is not failure.  Only when someone else puts it out there, do we say “me too”.  There is a relief and instant connection when we can say that the same thing has happened to us, we are on a similar path or we feel the same way.  When we hide the hard, we forgo that connection and support.  The more we share and the more honest we are, the easier it feels to carry our ‘hard’ parts.  I heard song lyrics “What’s the greatest chapter in your book?  Are there pages where it hurts to look?”.  We all have those pages, but not looking at them doesn’t erase them.  For me, reading those pages helps me to process them and make sense of them as I move forward.  So, I am writing those pages to share, in the hope that it will encourage others to share too and, if not, then it will at least provide a point of connection that lessens the ‘aloneness’.