I’m Not Who I Was Before

I’m Not Who I Was Before

There’s a version of me that existed before.

Before the diagnosis. Before the appointments that stack on top of appointments. Before I learned what an IEP was, what ABA stood for, what it felt like to sit in a room full of professionals talking about your child like they were a file.

Before sleep became something that happens to other people. Before I stopped knowing how to answer the question “how are you?”

Before I realized that the person I thought I was had quietly disappeared, and nobody had told me that was going to happen.

I don’t live in that before anymore.

And the strange thing — the thing that took me a long time to be able to say out loud — is that I’m not sure I’d go back even if I could.

Not because any of it has been easy. It hasn’t.

Not because I’d choose this path for my kids, or for myself.

I wouldn’t.

But because of what the hard has made of me.

And because of what I’ve learned — about perspective, about identity, about the lies I was telling myself long before any diagnosis ever entered my life — that I could not have learned any other way.

This is where I write about that.

My name is Chad Ratliffe. I’m the single parent to 5 kids within 6 years of age from one another and two with special needs — Rocco and Blu.

I started The Thriving Parent because I needed it to exist, and it didn’t.

So here we are.