Dear Addie,
I know I might sound like a broken record at this point, but I’m not sure there’s much that could really prepare someone for the highs and lows of parenting - let alone parenting within the special need’s realm. You see Ad, after a few years of what seems like trying to walk with your shoelaces tied together in reverse, you just come to a realization that you might never get anywhere on time again, or get 8 hours or even 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep, and somehow 24 hours is the new operational hours of your “a game” to boot. Ah yes, and it’s in these magical, sleep-deprived hours you will question your parenting multiple times, access an OCD file system you’ve developed in your head of your child’s color-coded plates for which meals, and let’s not forget the new job you can add to your resume as the family GPS tracker for all sensory objects, toys, and lovies just to leave the house. You’ll eventually stop wearing make-up, suddenly own house sweatpants, and fancier I’m going Target sweatpants. You’ll miss weird things like being able to buy diapers at that beloved Target in cases that you can just sling in your cart with one hand. Whereas now you can oddly navigate a little too well the ins and outs of the adult incontinence underwear, diapers & pull-ups world where they now show up at your door in a box that weighs 40lbs. There’s much less one arm slinging and more put your back into it shoving to get the box in the door.
Now don’t get me wrong, having said all this, there has been an awful lot of joy & love sprinkled all over these years, days, hours, and minutes of our journey, but you kind of just succumb to a life that most would find complicated and dare I say tiring - which makes the event of this week that much sweeter.
It was a week just like any other. You woke up for school like every other day and we jumped right into our normal routine. After getting dressed and making our way downstairs I proceeded to ask you what you wanted for breakfast rattling off the usual suspects… Cereal? Carrots? An apple? A bowl full of corn? (No judgment). Little did I know, today would be different. You said nothing, literally nothing. Instead, you calmly walked over to the refrigerator, got out a cold piece of pizza, and sat down on our kitchen sofa.
There you sat eating a piece of cold pizza like a poster child teenager. I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of this unusual scene.
You see Addie, I think sometimes you get to a point when life seems a bit more challenging and you stop looking ahead, but you’re also so caught up in the structure of what life has become that it can feel like just going through the motions. I hate to admit it, but I may have been sitting here for a little while now.
As I watched you flip the script on your usual breakfast, I couldn’t help but smile and feel so blessed to have experienced the chaos of our lives thus far. I know what you’re thinking - a little deep for just watching someone eat pizza, but this was different. There have been so many times where I really thought I had the wrong map for our journey, and I was surely getting us lost from where ever it was that we were meant to be. But at this moment, this moment of calm, this moment of independence, this moment of not having to make pizza from scratch and cut it into bite-size pieces only to be served on particularly colored plates, this moment of eating cold pizza was suddenly so much more than just breakfast.
I think as parents we all have these cold pizza moments, where there’s an unexpected gift of ease & calm and a front-row seat to seeing the growth of independence in the chaos of our day-to-day. They aren’t all cold pizza; some are spontaneously using the potty or maybe even an unprompted hug. Whatever the moment is disguised as I truly believe these surprise moments show up to remind us that we are indeed on the right path and should be proud of just how far we’ve come.
Addie there’s no telling what tomorrow may bring, but that’s ok because somehow that piece of cold pizza gave me the confidence to know that we are doing it all the right way no matter how crazy our life may seem.
Enjoy your pizza.
Love you.
Mom
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