Long time gone

He counted to five last night.

Four years and two months old, and my child counted to five.

This wouldn't be a source of celebration for most people. We aren't most people. We deal with sensory, auditory, emotional, and physical disorders every hour of the day. We walk a tightrope between trying to give him a normal life and childhood, and trying to cope with what so clearly is not normal.

In trying to cope, we take deep breaths. We take time outs. We repeat our instructions A LOT. We carry gun-range style headphones in the diaper bag for loud, overwhelming situations. We make a lot of eye contact when we speak. We have a lot of alone time when he wants it, and a lot of snuggles when he wants them as well. We cry, we rack our brains for what we could do better, we change up the routine, keep the routine the same, research, read, pray, hope. We try to be the best we can, and I feel like I fail so often.

We also dance. We laugh. We wiggle our butts at random. We read books, and giggle, and color, and eat cookies. We spend time with our friends and  each other. We try to learn new things, and we encourage him when he does something well-- so much so that I hear him constantly encouraging others (that warms my heart to no end).

I pray for patience (mostly when I've lost all of mine and we're both in separate corners in tears). I pray for answers that I don't really think will come. His heart and brain are both stable. Now we only deal with the unseen, non-life threatening things. And those, sometimes, are so much worse than the things that nearly killed him-- because when you're in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, you can feel God carrying you, and you can hold on to hope and just keep moving into the next second, praying your baby will live. And then, he does. And there's nothing like that feeling-- that elation, that thankfulness, that bliss-- that you put your very first baby into the hands of God and medicine and he came out better for it, and he gets to grow old. And he gets to have a future. And he gets to run and play and laugh, instead of feeling sick and sad and dizzy and being in pain all of the time.

It's the day in and day out that can really break you down and make you lose your faith. It's the days when you're pretty sure you're the worst mother on earth because you don't even LIKE your child and you just know he'd be better off in some alternate reality where he had a patient mama with the answers to his issues instead of the screwed up frazzled mess he's stuck with.

But if everything happens for a reason, and all things work together for the good of those who love God-- and I'm standing on those promises-- then Keagan's SUPPOSED to have me, in all of my mess and stress and imperfections. And I'm supposed to have him, in all the confusion that's in his mind sometimes, and with the misfires that happen sometimes. And we're supposed to make each other better, he and I. And someday, hopefully soon, we'll move past coping and into thriving. I know we're capable, it just takes time.