I grew up in Central New York. My husband did too.
Both of us went away for school. Both of us came back. Not because we couldn't go anywhere else, but because this is home, and we wanted our work and our life to be rooted here.
People who haven't lived here sometimes don't get it. They see the long winters, the gray skies, the small towns, and they wonder why on earth anyone would stay. I half-jokingly say all the time that I think CNY is one of the most beautiful places in the world to live. The half-joke is the delivery. The part I mean is the whole sentence.
What I mean by that
The four seasons matter to me. The first warm day in April when everyone is suddenly outside. The smell of summer in the lakes. The prink-red of fall in the hills. Even the snow, and there's a lot of it.
I just started learning to ski this past year, mostly at Labrador and Song Mountain. It was something I picked up in the spirit of making our long winters feel like fun instead of something to suffer through. There's something about being on a mountain in the cold that makes the rest of February make sense.
The land here is good. The summers are short and you feel them. The lakes are everywhere. The Adirondacks are a couple hours one way and the Finger Lakes are right there. You can drive ten minutes outside Syracuse and be in farmland.
What it means to be from a rural community
I went to elementary school and high school in rural upstate New York. That part of my background shapes how I do this work in ways I don't always think to explain.
When you grow up in an under-resourced rural community, you learn what it means to be far from the things people in cities take for granted. Specialists are an hour away. Therapy options are limited. A waitlist that might be inconvenient in Syracuse can be a real barrier in a small town where there's only one provider for fifty miles.
A lot of the families I want to serve are in exactly that kind of situation. Not enough OTs, not enough specialists, long waits, kids who don't get what they need because the system isn't set up to reach them. That's not someone else's problem. That's my community.
It's part of why I built a mobile, in-home practice. I drive to families. I'm not asking them to drive to me. The geography of this region matters, and the geography of who has access to good pediatric OT matters.
My sister's farm store, and the idea of pouring back in
My sister runs a small business in Eaton, NY called The Corner Lot Farm Store & Greenhouse. If you're local, you should check it out. Produce, plant starters, flowers, the works. I help her with it whenever I can. We just got her on-site greenhouse constructed this past week.
It's a small thing in the bigger picture, but it's a piece of why I'm doing what I'm doing. There's something about watching a sibling build something from the ground up in the place we both grew up in that's reinforced for me what I want my own work to be. I want to build something that pours back into this community. Something local people can use. Something that lasts.
I don't want to grow Empower Kids OT into a national franchise nor into something corporate. I want to be the OT in CNY that families talk about by name. The one who shows up at the door, knows the neighborhood, sits on the floor with your kid, and gives you tools you can use Monday morning during your child's meltdown.
Why private pay, and why in-home
I'll be honest about this part too. The traditional medical system in CNY is overwhelmed. Long waitlists, packed-tight schedules, parents stuck in waiting rooms, insurance dictating what gets done in a session, overworked and stressed-out therapists. I trained inside that system. I saw therapists set up to fail and families not getting what they deserved.
Private pay was a hard call. It costs families more out of pocket, and I care about that. But it's the only model that lets me do this work the way I believe it should be done. With parents in the room, with enough time to plan, with the freedom to address the whole picture instead of one narrow goal box that is dictated by what insurance deems worthy of intervention.
For families who can't access private pay, I'm working on building in scholarship spots specifically for single moms of special needs kids and for families who are going through hardship.
The short version
I do this work in CNY because CNY made me. Because my family is here (Madison County), my husband's family is here (Oswego County), the people who raised me are here, and the families who need this kind of support are here. Because the snow and the seasons and the lakes and the small towns are part of who I am. Because the system has let too many local families down, and I'm in a position to do something about that for some of them.
If you're a CNY parent and you've been struggling to find OT support that fits your life, or you'd just like to keep up with what I'm building here, I'd love to stay in touch.
Megan Matthews
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