A Family of 3 Amazing Boys – By Michelle Strom

The joys of two working parents raising a family of three boys in an area that has limited resources is never for the weak. If that got your attention, keep on reading! My name is Michelle Strom, and I am here to tell you all about how hard it is to find resources for a growing family and the limitations that I have had to overcome in the last nine years of being a parent.

My first son was born in 2016 with extreme colic, and we had to work through it as two parents who worked opposite schedules due to the lack of child care and the high expense of the ones that had availability. My husband would go to work from 6pm to 4am and I would leave the house at 5am and get home around 3pm. This plus us also having different days off would allow us time to see each other in passing but never have the amount of time needed to spend as a family. With that being said, we never needed child care due to the schedules, but we were both exhausted parents trying to survive the world of colic.

When we looked into child care, there were only three options. The two affordable ones were completely full and needed at least six months on a waiting list. The one that “fit” all my mom standards cost more than what I made in a month. So, getting up and going to work when our child was only sleeping in 30-minute increments (if I was lucky) for 10 months of his life was extremely rough. We did not receive family support during this time, and it was hard to be a first-time mom going through all of it on our “own”. The care that we did receive for his colic came with the famous saying of “he will grow out of it”. We went to specialist after specialist and that was the answer.

Now fast forward to two years later when my next son was born and it was a total day and night transformation. I went down to being a contract employee 6 months out of the year due to again the cost of child care and our work schedules. It is truly sad to think that child care could cost more than a mortgage payment in our area for one child. Putting our family’s needs ahead of my own career path was what we decided to do. With no family support to help watch the two little boys, my husband worked a lot of overtime to counteract me staying home, which limited our family time once again.

We were blessed for this option though because that is when my two-year-old started intensive speech therapy. I went to the pediatrician and was concerned with his speech growth around 18 months. He couldn’t get his words out at that time not because he didn’t have words, but he just couldn’t physically move his mouth to make the words come out. Well, after 6 months of being the “annoying” mom, we finally got scheduled through Early Intervention, but we did not qualify based off of his “need” not being there and the lack of speech pathologist in our area for his needs to be addressed.

So now onto working with another organization to get him re-evaluated and start the intensive therapy he needed two times a week for an hour each time. He not only went to speech, but also for therapy for his tongue and lip time. This mom of two boys under 2.5 was driving over an hour one way to get the services that he needed and should have been receiving in our area.

Now fast forward to Covid and me losing my job due to needing to come back into the work place but there being no child care available due to the safety precautions. This led to a hard financial time in our family with only one parent working. We did intensive therapy until he went into kindergarten, but this was the masked year of Covid. My child who already did not want to talk and struggled with his speech was masked. He truly struggled his first full year of public education.

Then we had our third boy in January of 2022. He completed our family and now had to go for physical therapy two times a week again an hour away each way from home due to torticollis from birth. So, I was dropping off one child at one school, then going to another school for my middle child, and driving an hour away for therapy three times a week for an hour and hoping to be back in time for preschool pick up, nap time, and then kindergarten pick up. The stress was at an all-time high in our house for sure! My poor husband picked up all the overtime he could to afford our family, and I worked as a stay-at-home mom to provide all the transportation and family time to our kids.

Then came an opportunity of a lifetime for me to go back to work as a full-time substitute in our district. Here comes the fun part of finding a child care for my littlest. We looked at the two in our area and the four in-home child cares. The prices were so high it did not make economic sense to go back to work. I then told my friend about this problem, and she offered her own niece to watch our little one for the school year because she was in school and needed the extra money. This was perfect for me because not only did this work out for me financially, but for her too.

Now comes second grade for my oldest, who truly started to struggle again in school. He was always the good kid now turning into the child who could not sit through the whole day and had a hard time during lessons. We finally got him into the doctors mid-way through the school year to find out he needed 16-hour testing for ADHD and that it was all done again 45 minutes away from our home. Then came scheduling those tests. It was hard to juggle everyone’s schedule and planning for these tests.

Now it has taken over a year of trying new medication and a lot of patience in the process from school, us as parents, and him. There have been so many times as a parent with limited resources I just wanted to give up, but then I look at my family and keep on going for them to have the best life.