Here We Are

Dear Addie,

I looked over at you sitting on the sofa gazing out the window and just like that it hit me - you’re a big kid now. Actually, not just a big kid, but a young lady rather. You’re within a pound or two of officially outweighing me and are now a half inch taller – here we are. A place I could hardly imagine even just a few short years ago, but there you were with your baby-ness all diminished, and I now see glimpses of the teenager emerging in you and we’ll be there before I know it.

Here we are.

It’s been a marathon journey of chasing calm and we are here. A younger naïve version of me thought it’d look a lot different than it does now. Research, evaluations, doctors, teachers, therapist - I thought I would have had it all figured out. I thought the delays and the struggles would have lightened their load. But much of what I “thought” this would look like was only just that, because the reality is there’s no real way of knowing of what’s to be. That’s a reality all parents face with their children. You can’t predict their future no matter how hard we try.

So, we keep running.

I always thought maybe we would catch up and our journey’s path would intersect at some point with where your peers are, but here we are still running the same winding, hilly roads and it seems the fog is too dense to see any intersections ahead.

Here we are.

Up and down, up and down, the highs and lows, keep us up and down. But like any marathon runner will tell you, you find your breath and the uphill (while inevitable) starts to seem more manageable than the hills before. But breath is only part of the game and the ground below us can change without warning.

We stay vigilant and keep going.

Addie it’s not always sunny on our journey and I have never been much of a runner, like ever, but we have logged many miles together up to this point and some felt really hard resulting in many times where it just felt like we couldn’t catch our breath, but here we are doing hard things, things we never could’ve imagined, finding our breath every step of the way.

I’m not a runner Addie, but I’ll run with you anywhere, because look how far we’ve come.

Here we are.

Love,

Mom