A companion to my conversation with Tanya on Conversations with Shloimie.
Some conversations stay with you. My recent one with Tanya — a mother raising her daughter, Hadassah, who is on the autism spectrum — was one of them. We talked for the better part of an hour about schools and diagnoses and resources, but underneath all of it was a quieter, more universal subject: what it means to love a child exactly as they are, in a world that wasn’t designed for them.
A world not built for her
Early on, Tanya named something I keep returning to. As her daughter gets older, she said, the gaps widen. The world we’ve built — its classrooms, its social rhythms, its unspoken rules — simply wasn’t made with Hadassah in mind. And so a parent’s task becomes a kind of ongoing, invisible labor: anticipating needs that can’t fully be anticipated, accommodating a day whose difficulties you can’t predict.
“I can’t even fully know,” she said, of what her daughter will need to move through the world smoothly. There’s a particular grief in that sentence. Not despair — Tanya is far too resourceful for despair — but the honest ache of a parent who would give anything to see through their child’s eyes, and knows they only ever partly can.
Diagnosis as a door, not a verdict
What struck me was how Tanya held the diagnosis itself. Not as a label to fear or a sentence to mourn, but as a tool. The ASD diagnosis was the thing that unlocked the right school, the right services, the network of people and organizations who could actually meet her daughter where she was. A word that frightens many families became, in her hands, a key.
There’s a lesson there for all of us. We often resist naming a hard truth because we think the name will make it heavier. Sometimes the name is what finally lets the help in.
Worth that was never up for debate
The heart of our conversation, for me, was a distinction I care about deeply: the difference between self-esteem and self-worth.
Self-esteem is earned and comparative — it’s how we measure up. The grade, the win, the sense that we’re good at something because the world reflected it back to us. Self-worth is something else entirely. It’s intrinsic. It says: you are enough, and you didn’t have to do anything to get here.
Tanya told me that her central goal for her daughter, from a very young age, was that her self-worth stay intact — that her sense of her own value never become hostage to a test score or a milestone. And here’s the thing: that’s not a special-needs goal. That’s the goal for every child, and every one of us. Most of the suffering I sit with in my work traces back, somewhere, to a person who learned to earn their worth instead of simply having it.
Imperfect, and still beautiful
Near the end, Tanya said something I wish every parent could hear on their hardest night. You will not do this perfectly. There will always be another call to make, another resource you didn’t find, a moment you lost your patience. And doing your best, as much as you can, has to be enough. “It could be very imperfect,” she said, “and still be very beautiful.”
She extended that even further — to the quiet, radical idea that a person’s worth was never tied to their productivity in the first place. A child who cannot speak, or walk, or hit a single measurable benchmark is not worth one ounce less. Being here, being loved, is itself the value.
If you are the parent of a child with special needs: forgive yourself. You are working harder than most parenting will ever ask, and the reward doesn’t always arrive in a form the world claps for. Your child’s worth — and your own — was never a score to be earned. It was there the whole time.
Shared with Tanya’s permission as a podcast guest. Written in my own voice, from the themes of our conversation. Education, not treatment; no client material.