Dr. Lisa Peña, 37, from Rio Hondo, wears many hats in her life.
Not only has she served veterans as a clinical pharmacist for more than 10 years, but she is also a blogger, author, public speaker, nonprofit co-founder, proud coach’s wife and busy mother of three, including a daughter named Isla, who has a unique subset of autism.
For Lisa, being a mother has been the single most impactful label that she will ever carry.
“I believe that Isla and the autism that is a part of her life, enhanced our life,” she said. “Some experiences I have as a mother are exaggerated. They’re just a little bit more potent, but overall, it really enhanced what motherhood was for me and what our family dynamic is.”
She said the journey of motherhood has been challenging and anything but ordinary, but it has led her to her calling.
Over the last year, Lisa co-founded Labeled and Loved, a nonprofit organization that embraces and strengthens families who have a loved one with special needs by providing connective experiences and educational resources.
The organization was co-founded by four women around Texas — Lisa, Julie Hornok, Dr. Regina Crone and Stephanie Hanrahan.
They said their lives intersected because they love someone with a label.
The co-founders hope that the nonprofit not only provides individuals with personal growth, but also systemic change in the community.
“It’s been about a year in the making that we had this dream and the dream became reality so quickly, particularly over this year because of COVID,” Lisa said. “It gave us so much time for reflection and hard work to build relationships with each other and know what we really wanted this to be in the end.”
From monthly blog challenges and educational videos to retreats and a launched podcast series, Labeled and Loved has several different components.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the nonprofit was unable to have live events this year, but has many scheduled for next year.
The first event is scheduled for April 2021 and will be a weekendlong retreat held in San Antonio, particularly for mothers who have special needs children with any diagnosis.
Another soon-to-be component of Labeled and Loved is “Sisterhood Circles.”
These will be online communities where participants can join a group that’s specific to what they’re looking for or want to discuss.
“It’s filling in the social and emotional part of these families that probably never get out or don’t get to do this as much as others,” Lisa said. “A lot of exciting things are coming next year that really are what we had planned on being the biggest focus, but COVID has forced us to look into the other ways to help online first and then we’ll go from there.”
CREATING A SAFE SPACE
Based on studies and research Lisa’s collected over time while applying for grants, she’s found clinical evidence that shows that mothers of children who have developmental disabilities are at an elevated risk of depression.
She said the risks of depression are not shown to that extent in families that have the most social and emotional support in several different ways.
Lisa believes Labeled and Loved fills that gap.
“We understand very much that I cannot help you by going to therapy with you or go sit with you in the doctor’s office,” she said. “I can’t be there for those things, but I can offer social support — a community where you feel you’re understood, where you belong, where you don’t feel isolated and where you actually have opportunities to meet people and have experiences that you wouldn’t have that really connect you.”
Lisa believes that alone is a huge impact for families.
“We’ve seen it over and over again, particularly in women that have expressed that to us, so I’m hoping that will continue to grow,” she explained.
Lisa said Isla inspired the creation of the nonprofit because she wanted to create a community she wishes she had years ago.
According to Lisa, Isla began showing subtle delays at an early age.
“You question yourself because she was so beautiful and great that there were just these little odd things,” she said. “It really wasn’t until we started day care that we noticed that she was very different from the other children — how she processed things, played, interacted, paid attention or couldn’t pay attention for that matter, the lack of toys that she would use and a lot of different things.”
Lisa said by the time Isla was 2, she wasn’t talking, so she and her husband knew something was going on.
“We started going to doctors at that point, but we were just kind of told to do speech therapy and to just give her therapy,” she said. “Autism never came into the picture during that time because she was so expressive.”
Lisa said as the years went by Isla began having struggles at school with different kinds of behaviors and learning.
After receiving the autism diagnosis at the Driscoll Children’s Hospital when Isla was 6, Lisa and her husband moved to Corpus Christi from the Rio Grande Valley to be near a clinic that offered weekly, full-day applied behavioral analysis therapy.
“This was in a manner of a week. We literally made the decision, picked up and went,” Lisa said. “We’re from the Valley. This is our home in every way. So I think you have to understand that part to know what a big deal that was for us.”
Lisa said the ABA therapy gave Isla coping skills for different behaviors that kept her from learning.
“That was very helpful, but really the bigger part of that story is that once we were there, we realized this is an incredible program,” she said. “I knew as a mom, as a Valley native, that this would never come to the Valley if I didn’t try to get it here.”
Lisa worked with a company to try to get a location in the Valley that offered ABA therapy.
After several requests, a small ABA therapy session was held in Harlingen for interested families that ended up being standing room only because the need was so great.
Lisa said less than a year from when they moved to Corpus, a full-day ABA clinic was made in Harlingen and there are now at least three or four in the Valley.
According to Lisa, hundreds of kids are being served and she thinks a lot of that was because of Isla’s life.
She said if it weren’t for the struggles and the challenges they had, they would never have gone to understand how valuable that was for the community.
“I will always be very humbled that we were used for good in that way,” Lisa said. “There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of people who did a lot to get that here, not just me, but I know that Isla’s life was definitely used for good in whatever struggles she had.”
THE MOCHA DIARIES
Lisa wrote a book about the first 10 years of Isla’s life, and found writing the book to be therapeutic.
“When I realized it was a great form of therapy, I thought it would be cool if I could get moms that have a special needs child to read my book,” Lisa said. “Then, I could hear their story and write about it because it would help them. It’s therapy for them. It’s therapy for me.”
This led Lisa to create the Moms of Children that have Autism (MOCHA) Diaries, a blog that shares written and audio-styled stories of mothers who have children with special needs.
“The stories resonated. They grew very quickly,” Lisa said. “I went through one a month and everyone was really excited to read them. Most readers did not have special needs kids.”
Lisa said what happened that she was not expecting, was that the stories really began to build radical empathy in the community.
She said all of a sudden, people who wouldn’t typically understand were starting to understand.
“That’s when I realized that there was something powerful about storytelling,” she said. “I realized that maybe that was a talent that I hadn’t really tapped into because my whole life I was writing academic stuff.”
For Lisa, her biggest inspiration is the mothers who are brave enough to share their story.
She said every time she walks away from a conversation with a mother who has shared so openly, she’s always overwhelmed by how resilient and powerful they are.
Lisa notices a lot of times people equate a woman with what society says is a big accomplishment or what makes them worthy.
“I’m seeing this other side of how quiet worthiness can be,” she said. “Every decision, every move she makes, she does to make her most vulnerable child have their best life. There is an incredible beauty in that that I think we overlook a lot.”
For Lisa, being able to see that on a regular basis is both rewarding and the biggest inspiration for her to keep going. She said that’s what makes what she does worth it.
Lisa said her passion and goal over the course of her life is to tell as many stories as possible in as many forms as possible to build radical empathy in the special needs population.
“The power of a story is crazy, but also the flip side of that is there’s a lot of danger in a single story of one person or one thing,” Lisa said. “We have to have multiple stories because Isla’s story is one.”
