Seven Years

After all these years, it’s hard to believe that it can be so good.  At the end of 2009 I never wanted to have another year like that!  At the end of 2015 I felt like life had never been so good!   

Life is interesting like that, you just never know what is just around the corner, and it’s so important to believe that it can get better, and better.  These years are so important because it helps us to be realistic about what better means and what the quality of happiness personally means to each of us.

Better doesn’t mean our children will be fixed and be filtered out of the world of special needs – but after this amount of time, I love Luke so much because of who he is and how he constantly has a positive attitude even when he feels sick or sore.    As Nina Zylstra, editor of special kids puts it “Better may see no change in our children at all, but may see the most noticeable changes in us, the parents. Some parents will get better at handling their kid’s struggles, they no longer notice strangers staring or how others disapprove of their children’s outbursts, squawks and general weirdness”.  We as parents learn to deal with other people and their inappropriateness at times a lot better.

Better doesn’t either mean that we buy that syrupy nonsense – this is the best thing that EVER happened to me. I’ve watched my son struggle in doing the most basic of things and I know for a fact that this isn’t the best thing that ever happened to me or him.   But I do know that our lives have been enriched by Luke and his presence in our lives.  I have also watched how his presence enriches that of others and how he has a magnetic energy that draws people to him for such positive reasons.

Better is seen in the simplest of ways. It is slow to start but eventually you see how you have gotten some of your life back, that life is good, and actually better and more multidimensional than it would have been had Luke not been a part of it. 

Whilst, I never thought this possible in the early years with Luke, I want to share that 7 years on – the best was still to come.