It’s everywhere.

You can find it while impatiently waiting to be “next on line” at the bank and pondering the perplexities of an economy that allows the price of pizza to rise to the realm of haute cuisine.

You can find it waiting to jump out at you as you spend endless hours sitting in a doctor’s waiting room because you made sure to get there on time, but the educated professional apparently missed the second grade lesson on how to tell time.

And it always finds you in your Shabbos or Yom Tov preparations as you scour the countryside on a quest for the one pair of shoes that may or may not have been invented, and you simply must have, to complete your outfit.

It is that unwanted component that catches you when you are at your busiest, to tease you with your deepest insecurities and feelings of inadequacy.

Yes, stress is everywhere. Actually it’s stress and also those endless personality tests that you find in all forms of literary publications every time you turn around.

And that causes the most stress of all. Because, even if we cheat, and look at the answers before we surreptitiously rate ourselves, inevitably, taking one of these personality exams leaves the average wonderful human being feeling as if they are somehow lacking.

And, as the parent of a special needs child, I am already highly classified in this particular Personality Trait Lacking Department, and I sure don‘t need the extra stress!

So, I have an idea. The time has come for a special needs test made for those individuals who are already classified as officially in a Stress Mess. A test, where the criteria would be more understanding to the average daily lifestyles that parents of special needs children routinely face. An exam where questions are focused on ordinary activities like therapist appointments, intensive invasive testing and treatment, and treating an extraordinary physically or mentally challenged child in an ordinary way.

Yes, life is full of tests. And life is full of stress. So, as parents of special needs children we should have our very own Parents of Special Needs Official Stress Test, or POSNOST (rhyming with glasnost), for short.

And I’m sure we’d do well.

But first, what is stress anyway?

According to research that I have conducted on the subject (I called seven different people and read an article), stress can be defined in many different ways.

A well known medical journal whose name escapes me in my time of stress, defines stress as the uncomfortable gap between how we would like our life to be and how it actually is.

My own research shows that housewives define stress as the correlation between the amount of people coming to your house to be wined and dined, and the level of perfection you are aiming for while trying to appear calm, cool, and collected, and above all not stressed out.

Teenagers define stress as not being able to have the highest pouf in the class, or worse, not owning the latest fad, which, of course, is not yet available on the market.

A friend instinctively associated stress with the often perplexing tribulations that arise in marriage, but she specifically warned me against using her definition or her name, because she has children she wants to marry off, and she doesn’t need any more stress.

My former favorite sister, Shani, says that to her, stress equals her older sister - Tziri.

And me, I define stress by how late I am for my latest article deadline. Well, that and the size of the pile in my laundry basket. Oh yes, and sometimes by the medical and emotional trauma of having to be the spokesperson for my mentally and physically handicapped son, Yossi.

But what do I know? I just collect the facts and then let them speak for themselves. So to find out where you stand on the ladder of stress, take the following stress test.

PARENTS OF SPECIAL NEEDS OFFICIAL STRESS TEST – POSNOST

When you wake up in the morning, do you:

A] Jump out of bed with your feet in running mode, calling out instructions to those nearest to you while you dress and make beds at the same time

B] Throw things at the alarm clock

C] Immediately hit the snooze button and tell yourself that obviously someone else forgot to set the clock properly

D] Thank Hashem for another wonderful day and hum to yourself as you waltz around the house delighting in all the work that faces you

When a therapist of your special needs child calls up “for just a moment of your time,” do you:

A] Immediately put on a foreign accent and in broken English explain that “Meesus eez not home!”

B] Put the phone on speaker mode and go about your business with an occasional “hmmm” or “nice” to keep the conversation flowing

C] Make faces at the phone but politely cooperate

D] Make a beeline for the notebook where you keep accurate accounts of every conversation, appointment, and miscellaneous “it may be important one day” information

When going somewhere with your special needs child, do you:

A] Wear dark sunglasses and a different color shaitel, so no one can recognize you

B] Only go out after dark or on stormy days so you won’t meet anyone

C] Talk very loud and fast to distract people’s attention from your child to yourself

D] Stop and greet everyone, friends and strangers alike, and enthusiastically share the progress (or lack thereof) of your special needs child

When attending Simchos, do you:

A] Arrive three hours late and leave three hours early because you figure if you finally got out of the house there are plenty of places you would really like to go, so why waste time at someone else’s simcha?

B] Sit in a corner of the hall and catch up on telephone calls and those books/articles you wanted to read for the last few months, because when will you ever have a chance to just sit again?

C] Try not to stare in confusion at the Baalei Simcha because they are celebrating a milestone moment with their child that you will probably never have

D] Try your best to fit in with everyone else even if you don’t understand why worrying about Global Warming would be anyone’s priority

When you hear the word stress, do you:

A] Immediately think of doctors, therapists, social workers, and appointments

B] Assume you missed this week’s One Day Sale at Macy’s

C] Think someone is calling you by your nickname

D] Look around for the nearest deep-fried, high-fat and simply scrumptious chocolate bar or other comfort food

SCORES
Give yourself

10 points for every “A” answer,

5 points for every “B” answer,

3 points for every “C” answer and

1 point for every “D” answer.

Now, without adding any more stress to your life, tally up your scores, and discover your level of stress.

If you scored 26-50 you are a typical parent or caregiver of a special needs child. You are responding exactly as you should even if the rest of the human race would classify you as highly stressed and in desperate need of some government funded vacation – like the next respite weekend retreat that your social service agency is hosting.

If you scored 15-25 you are one of those individuals that somehow, someway, manages to deal with the challenges and stress that comes your way. OK, so maybe there are a few areas that could use some improvement, but in general you are labeled as only severely stressed which qualifies you for your favorite form of rest and relaxation – or at least a free copy of SPIRIT! Magazine.

If you scored 6-15 you are in good company. The vast majority of stressed out persons falls into this category. So, unless you are the kind of person who finds it stressful to be just one of the crowd, you can relax (yeah right!), and go with the flow. Either way, I recommend the panacea that will cure your stress - some form of the cocoa bean!

If you scored 1-5 you are obviously the most extreme level of stress, so badly off, in fact, that you either did not read the questions correctly, or the stress of taking a test so frazzled you that you could not tally up the scores correctly. I suggest you take the test again and, not to stress you out or anything, but try harder this time! Or, you can just pick a number as your final tally based on the treatment plan that best suits you, like other stressed out people do!

How to Deal with Stress
Stress not, my fellow ‘Stressees’. After some careful research, where I read the entire “How To Cope with Stress” pamphlet that just “happened” to be left in my car, my mailbox and on Yossi’s bed the last time I went to visit, I have summarized the “101 ways to cope with stress” into the most interesting or important suggestions. I encourage you to get a cup of highly caffeinated coffee, leave the young ones to fend for themselves, and isolate yourself in a bubble bath to figure out how to best reduce the stress in your life. And look at that, I covered three big stress coping solutions without even getting started!

Get up 15 minutes earlier.
Inexplicably, this was the first suggestion for coping with stress. Now, far be it from me to assume that I, and my life experiences are more knowledgeable than the well paid individuals who get to sit around and make up the rules that the rest of us are required to follow, but why and how can getting up fifteen minutes earlier help me avoid stress, when waking up is what stresses me out to begin with? And when you have a child who wakes up at 4:00am for the day, do you really want me to get up fifteen minutes before that? Because if that’s the case, watch out world!

Break large tasks into bite size portions, and yet maintain your weight.
Clearly this was made up by someone who has never had to diet. Because anyone who is careful to take bite size portions and finds maintaining one’s weight a worthwhile pastime cannot be a person without stress. On the other hand, it does definitely detract from the inevitable stress of dealing with a special needs child and all that goes along with that situation. And while we’re on the subject of food, I should mention that true comfort is actually found in chocolate éclairs, caramel cheesecake, and mounds of marzipan. It’s just that for some reason these same “they” always forget to include that on the informational facts on the back of the package, I blame it on their stressful dietary practices.

Look at challenges differently.
Since I am already legally and socially classified as different, do “they” mean differently than the way I look at challenges already, or differently than I would have looked at them if I had not had a child that was born different. And is there really a difference?

Be prepared for rain, and yet take a walk in the rain.
It’s hard to comment on advice as important as this. Besides it pretty much sums up how I live my life already. It also explains why I always seem to be having bad hair days.

Dance a jig and/or Hum a jingle.
Now this may work to relieve some of my stress, but woe unto the person who has to hear or see me – what do they do for stress then?

Tell someone to have a good day in pig Latin.
Of all the suggestions I read, this one is my favorite. But that may be because my personal stress reliever has always been “I-whay E-Bay Ormal-Nay”. In any case, they both work.

Remember that stress is an attitude.
Are you talking to me, buddy?

Say “no” more often.
Which is why you may have noticed me muttering to myself, I’m practicing this one. The only problem is, people have stopped asking me questions. Few even bother to talk to me anymore. At this point, it is only Yossi who always welcomes my company with a cheerful smile.

And that brings me to the best stress reliever of all

Take the time to realize that taking care of a special needs child means being entrusted with the safekeeping of a pure sweet soul.
But I’m not taking any chances. There is a large economy size bar of chocolate hidden deep in the bowels of my pantry and it has my nickname (stress) written all over it!

You may comment on this article at the discussion board at www.spiritmag.org.

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Tziri Frank is a proud mother of five beautiful children. She uses her experience with her own special child to inspire others in a thought provoking and often entertaining way.