Bring On Lemons

If you were a boat, the following could be said: When the waves are tossing you about and the turbulence is more than you can bear you return to port. Returning to the safety of the harbor where you find refuge and safety among others of your kind. Life isn’t entirely different than sailing. When a woman feels as if her very being is shattering – during childbirth – she calls out for her mother. Our natural instinct is to return home. Sometimes home is a town, a building, the loving arms of friends and family, and sometimes it is merely a smell or a memory. I place we long to be but can never find in the physical sense. I feel that way myself from time to time. I seek the camaraderie of a particular melody or the words of a poem. Today it was the lovely words written nearly one hundred years ago by poet Amy Lowell. I have a delightful text book from 1923 that describes Amy in the following way: No one has fought, in theory and in practice, the battles for the experimental a...

What's on my mind...is the incredible moral strength one must have to be a parent of a special needs child.  What my mind cannot even comprehend is the faith that a parent must have to be a parent of a terminal child. I remember being told that my first child had a rare condition (a defect if you will) that would have been fatal just a few years earlier. I remember the fear, anger, rage, love, and loneliness that flowed through my being during that early ultrasound. I recall with great clarity the discussions about options, procedures, doctors, outcomes, facilities, and mortality rates. I cannot imagine what it feels like to hear the words 'terminal' and/or 'fatal' in reference to your child. I think about it and my stomach physically hurts, my legs long to run far and fast, and tears well up in my eyes. My throat tenses and I know if I spoke the sounds would be guttural and unrecognizable. How do you hold things together when you can see the sign so clearly...