Grieving

Recently, I've had quite a few conversations with different people - on the exact same subject... Grieving.

Now that word has not been the exact word used during these conversations, but thinking back to each conversation, grief was basically what it boiled down to.  Grief is usually associated with the sorrow and emotions of losing a loved one.  But grief can be caused by any loss - loss of a job, loss of a friendship, loss of a dream...

Life with Carson (ie: borage of appointments, worries about his shunt and brain pressure, working with therapists, researching about his disabilities, seeking our resources, etc., etc., etc.) is just the norm.  I don't spend each day focusing his "delays" or constantly worrying about what areas he's behind in or what his future will look like.  Carson is Carson.... loving, cuddly, funny, quirky, sweet.  We spend our days playing with his mirrors and beads, working on tummy time (kinda), mommy giving zerberts, holding him on my chest to put him to sleep, breastfeeding, being slobbered and spit up on, receiving slobbery kisses, changing a bazillion poopy diapers.  Life is life.  Life with Carson, and all that goes along with his needs, is just the norm around our house now.

Yet moments and emotions come from time to time, where the realization of Carson's development delays and issues, kinda hit me out of nowhere... and they hit me hard.  I'll see a video that someone has posted of their child around the same age, laughing and cooing.  I see pictures of babies smiling and making eye contact with the camera.  Seeing kiddos hold up their body strength (assisted of course) on their legs.  Babies that want to face forward.  And sometimes those moments make me realize the reality of where Carson is at... the delays that he has... the unknowns of the future. And at those times, I grieve for what I wanted for Carson; what I wanted for our family.  The dreams that I had.

Thankfully those moments are far and few between.

Just this week, I came across a wonderful blog, written by a mom with a special needs son (one of his disabilities is blindness, which is what brought me to her blog).  I was reading through past entries she made, and one really struck home in regards to what I've been discussing with many recently - grief.  Hope you enjoy it!  Thank you Emily Coleman, for sharing your heart!

Raising a Child Who is Blind and...

"Grieving" By Emily Coleman

As I work my way through school to become a teacher of the visually impaired, which I'm doing now, I keep running into information about "grieving." Most often we think of grieving as the actual death of someone, but we can actually grieve a great many things. Through brainstorming at school, different types of grief were mentioned including grieving a lost job, lost marriage, lost friendship, and even lost dreams.

As a parent of Eddie, that last one "lost dreams" is something that I have to realize and work through on occasion. When we were pregnant with Eddie we had a lot of hopes and dreams for our son and envisioned a future that we didn't know would not come. At least, not exactly as we dreamed. This hasn't been a grieving process that I went through once and now I'm healed. Many times I am thrown back into the realization that our life with Eddie is not "typical." That doesn't mean it is worse, but that it is much different.

Large milestones that are missed tend to bring about the hardest times for me. I grieved when he was 1 1/2 and still not walking, I grieved when he turned 3 and still didn't talk, and most recently I grieved when school started this year and he didn't go to kindergarten with all the other 5 year olds. Children who I watched stretch their Mom's tummy's while Eddie stretched mine walked into that school and I witnessed it because I was taking my 1st grader to school. This was extremely hard and still brings tears at the memory. A prime example of grieving the future that never came, even when I thought that was behind me.

As a note to parents like me, these days are few and far between. I don't always miss those "lost dreams" but now have found new dreams for Eddie. So much focus is placed on bigger milestones for typically developing children, but the small steps are important, too. Many times celebrating the successes of small steps is what keeps us moving forward instead of "grieving" the larger ones.

Thank you Emily!