„Manchmal müssen wir wie Löwen kämpfen“

In its section „Momentaufnahme“ (a snapshot), the Lebenshilfe Zeitung introduces families in which a person with a disability lives. In issue 2/2024, Melanie Matl answers the family questionnaire: a mother of three, at home in the Allgäu, with a daughter born with a rare genetic condition.

She describes how it was after the diagnosis: asked who helped her at the time, she answers that, honestly, at first nobody did. Psychological support in those first months would have done her good. With the formalities, the Lebenshilfe Ostallgäu helped with first information — on early intervention and on the Behindertenausweis, the official disability pass — and an association answered her questions about the diagnosis. (Translated)

What wears her down in everyday life is the bureaucracy: the constant struggle for entitlements, the forms that have to be researched and filled in. „It is such a shame that we parents so often have to fight like lions for our children with a disability,“ she says — hence the title of the piece. She would like the time family carers spend on this to be counted as working time. (Translated)

Asked what she was last truly glad about, she names the affection of the last two au pairs for her daughter — the cinema, the swimming pool, painting nails, afternoons together. The au pair, she says, has become her daughter's best friend. That is where the agency came from: she wants to share that experience, to strengthen and support families, and to bring a little more ordinary life into their caring days. (Translated) The piece also tells the road there: years of grief after the diagnosis, then acceptance — and strength growing out of it. From that came the children's book, participatory readings and, in early 2024, the founding of the au pair agency. „I think it is enormously important that our society gives every single person the chance to live a dignified life,“ she says. (Translated) The piece is here because it names the reason for our work in her own words. Who we are is set out under ; what an au pair takes on in everyday life, and what expressly falls outside the role, is described under . What an au pair year costs is set out openly on the page .

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