A friend of mine once told me, "I know my life will change one day, and it will change yet again and yet again. Nothing ever stays the same."
I find it coincidental that I remembered this today...it ties in with a conversation I was having with a family member earlier about chronic pain. She told me that she kept waiting for the pain to resolve and get to a manageable point so that she could move on and make plans. The problem was that with her condition, it would remain unpredictable the rest of her life and would probably never resolve.
How do you live with something that's unpredictable? How do you deal with something that you know is not going to resolve? I find myself comparing this to what we are going through with Logan and know that it's the same. Some people think that autism is a thing that you can "get over" or "grow out of". And for some, that may be true, in a sense. It's not so much that they "get over it", it's that they mature and learn excellent coping skills.
But this is not going to happen with our son. There are too many other things that complicate his condition.
How do you live with that?
I always used to tell people that he would live with me for the rest of my life. I accepted that a long time ago and made those plans in my head. For me, that was what life had in store for me, and that was fine.
But sometimes life has different plans. Things change. The hardest decision anyone can ever make will be to do what's best for their child when it doesn't follow the map you've drawn on your heart.
So what is the point, then of making plans? Of hoping for things, of setting goals, if life is so damned fickle, and it never does what you think it's going to do? The point is that it's better to be an active participant than someone who's benched.
No matter what cards you get dealt, you play your best hand.
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