Maskus Miracles: A New Year!

Monday, January 3, 2011

A New Year!

2011! A new year! We spent the new year in Kansas with my in-laws and had a great time. We all really needed the time away. Once we got home I opened our new calendar and started transferring birthdays, anniversaries, etc. It struck me how bare our 2011 calendar looks compared to 2010. SOOO many entries. Doctors appointments, tests, xrays, therapies, surgeries, and a few fun things like dinners and parties with friends. It's amazing to visually see how much we really did during last year. Then I look to this years calendar. BLANK. The possibilities are endless. Maybe this year our calendar will be filled with first. First time Evan crawled, stood, took a step, first loose tooth for Lauren.

Our 1st first will happen tomorrow. After much struggling, fighting and crying we are getting a stander for Evan. We were fortunate enough to be able to borrow one for a while since our insurance would not cover it and we are still years away from getting Medicaid.

Tomorrow, Evan will stand. Standing is the first step in actually taking steps!!

I am trying hard not to have any expectations or time frames in my head. I am just grateful to be able to have access to a stander and we will see where it all goes from there.

Hope you all had a Happy New Year and wishing you a 2011 full of possibilities.

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Welcome To Holland

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this…
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!” you say. “What do you mean, Holland?” I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.
But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.