I hide behind my pranks, jokes, laughter and big smile. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all completely authentic but sometimes I’m minutes or seconds away from feeling anger, sadness or even crying.
The anger I still feel is from my oldest sons untimely death from Cancer. Just remembering painful moments only him & I shared still haunt me because I know he was scared and I couldn’t help him. I’m angry cause I watched him wake up every morning & die a little more again every single day. It was torturous to watch and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I relive it every day in my memories.
The sadness I feel is trying to help my youngest son live a somewhat normal life despite his severe autism. It’s like watching someone trapped in their own body fighting to communicate on a daily basis. My fourteen year old son lives an extremely structured lifestyle and anything outside of it turns his world upside down. He needs 24 hour supervision and could never be left alone therefore my husband & I take turns running independent errands. We know no one will ever be able to give our son the special care & attention we give him which is why we chose not to ever hire a sitter.
Additionally, our son has severe sensory processing disorder. His hearing is extremely sensitive so we can’t have any televisions on in the house while he’s home. We can’t run the vacuum cleaner or microwave in his presence. The local emergency response vehicles who run their sirens on our road will trigger a violent meltdown from him. The latest trigger has been the birds chirping outside (yeah you read that right) so now we turn on the fan in the house to drown out the noise. We don’t throw parties, don’t have company & we’re usually in bed by 8pm cause we’re up every morning between 5:30am-6am (even on weekends).
I’m not complaining. This is our life & we’ve adjusted to this way of living. My husband & I laugh a lot, crack jokes & make fun of ourselves. Time is very precious to us and we do the best we can with what little private time we have each day. So when people invite us to go here & there (ie. wedding, parties etc) and we say we can’t go, it’s cause we really can’t. We never attend a function “together” for obvious reasons & if we say “yes” to something then only one of us will go.
The only time I will get annoyed is if someone becomes pushy about us “not attending” a function & that only happened once. I will explain “why not” only one time and after that I’m done. My patience level after my son passed has decreased tremendously.
I choose to make the best of what I have. Laughter helps me get through my pain & tough days. Laughter is my best mental escape.
AlliedsWings 