As the mother of two teenagers with special needs, I was excited by the nomination of Sarah Palin for vice president.

Palin is the mother of a child with Down syndrome who pledged during her Republican convention speech that she would advocate for families such as mine.

But a common thread throughout much of the reaction to her nomination has had a flipside:

"What's the mother of a tiny baby with Down syndrome doing running for national office? That child needs her more than her country does."

I've heard it from the right and the left, from people with and without experience raising challenged children.

To be sure, there are days when I feel lucky if I have enough time and energy to tie my own shoes. Parents of children with disabilities tend to become their own case managers -- mothers more than fathers, I suspect, with no disrespect to the overinvolved dads out there -- and it's hard to imagine how it would be possible to run your child's treatment and run a country at the same time.

Yet I gotta tell you, those "her needy child needs her" comments rub me the wrong way. They hit the same sore spot as declarations of "You're a saint for the way you care for that child" and "I could never do that" always do.

There's a common assumption that a child with special needs brings nothing but sacrifice, and soul-crushing labor, and selflessness -- that parenting such a child is all about burying oneself in service.

Certainly, there's enough service to bury you. Certainly, having a child who needs so much help can seem like a good excuse to withdraw from the world, even if the world didn't already tend to withdraw from us.

Here's the hard question, though: How are our children ever to gain the visibility needed for full inclusion and full understanding and full sensitivity if their most passionate and knowledgeable advocates are supposed to do nothing but caring and case-managing? Our Mama Bear focus on the immediate and the day-to-day has real value, but it too often serves to keep us and our children invisible to society.

Visibility is important, and it almost always comes with a trade-off. You go to a PTA meeting, and you think of how you could have better spent the time helping your child with homework. You write a blog about your children's struggles, and you wonder if you've violated their right to privacy. You get involved in advocacy groups, and you wonder if you're neglecting your kids to do it.

Parents of children with special needs don't really need pundits and blog-commenters to beat us up. We do a pretty good job of it all by ourselves.

I'm not saying that parenting a child with special needs is not a worthy vocation in and of itself. Just that it's often a good excuse for withdrawing from the world, and it doesn't need to be. It shouldn't be. It can't be, if we want our children to ever be part of that world.

Not many of us are called to as big a stage as Sarah Palin has been. But if we are, and we're so inclined as to accept, I think there's an awful lot of good that can be done.

I hope we can adjust our Mama Bear viewfinders to see that, while having a mother who can't devote 24/7 to his treatment and therapy might not be ideal for little Trig, having a mother who can raise the visibility of children with Down syndrome and families of children with special needs is potentially an extremely good thing for him and for all of our children.

(Plus, I'd like to believe that being VP might carry some awesome perks in the area of therapists and doctors coming to you. There's a trapping of power I wouldn't mind having.)

Though I'll admit I'm tempted to make up "Trig Palin for Vice President's Kid!" bumper stickers, I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting any of this as reason to vote for one ticket over another.

I'd just like it not to be a reason not to.

One thing I hope we learn as parents of special children is that everybody has unique strengths and talents, and focusing all attention on weaknesses is a pretty bad way to make progress. However this election turns out, I hope it serves to bring some leaders among us out of hiding.

Mauro has two teenagers with special needs whom she adopted from Russia in 1994. She is author of "The Everything Parent's Guide to Sensory Integration Disorder" and blogs at specialchildren.about.com.