Marriage

Colon Blow

by Mary on August 17, 2011

[Tim: Mary tells her story about everything that happened over the last few weeks that I first posted about in "When Medical Emergencies Attack Your Spouse".]

Towards the end of June, my tummy started to hurt a little. By the beginning of July, it was a bit more bothersome, and on July 2, I had a really bad night. I assumed this was another diverticulitis flare, and told Tim I was going to go to the ER and probably get some oral antibiotics, and come home. The doctor told me it looked REALLY minor, and that 10 days worth of antibiotics would take care of it.

Except, the pain wasn’t getting better, and in fact got worse. I lived with it until the next Sunday… and then called my parents to say that I was going to the ER, that I would probably be put into the hospital for IV antibiotics, and could they please come and stay with the kids. I packed my little overnight bag with some pajamas and a pair of clothes to come home in, and off Tim and I went. The CT scan confirmed that the really minor place looked a goodly amount worse, but again, I figured there would be IV antibiotics, and I would go home.

I spent the next few days attached to IV antibiotics. My parents brought Dale Jr. to visit on Monday, and he climbed onto the bed and we snuggled. Everyone was very careful to keep him from doing me any damage, but I just hadn’t really started feeling better from the antibiotics yet.

On Tuesday, the surgeon came in and started up about surgery again. I looked at the man and said, “Look, you’re a surgeon. Everything looks like it needs cutting to you. I want a second opinion… by a gastroenterologist.” Enter the gastroenterologist on Tuesday afternoon, who began our conversation with “I haven’t read your chart.” I immediately bristled, and then calmed down when he continued, “Because I don’t want to be swayed by other doctors’ comments; I only looked at your scans.” I looked at him for a minute, and then he sat down in the bedside chair and sort of sighed and said, “You need to have this surgery. This place looks pretty bad, and it’s not going to get better.”

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Lessons from the Road – One Year Later

by Tim on July 30, 2011

One year ago today, I started running again after many years. My resolutions from The Great Burnout last year were to run and change my diet. That was basically it, though each involved massive lifestyle changes. But my what changes they have wrought in my life. If you’ll indulge me a bit, here are some things I learned over the past year. Hopefully at least one of them will mean something to you, too.

As with many attempts to improve one’s life, the part not long after I started was the hardest. If you think about it, just starting something new is perhaps the easiest part. Many of us do it every year with New Year’s resolutions. Often they might last a few days or weeks (or hours) because it’s the next step after you start where it’s usually the hardest. The honeymoon is the easy part. It’s when you have to commit to the day in and day out relationship that the work begins. Often, there’s not as much passion and glamour in this ongoing work as we’d hoped there would be. We have to draw our energy from somewhere else.

For exercise and health-related changes, I tend to call this the ‘Rocky Training Montage Problem’. In the Rocky movies, Rocky Balboa has some life crisis, some period of doubt where he thinks about giving up, something then happens to inspire him, and then cue the epic music and grunting in the gym where Rocky transforms into a perfect physical specimen ready to face and defeat an invincible foe, all in the span of about four minutes. The all-day, everyday devotion to the training and hard work required to get there are left on the editing floor. That’s where the really great stuff happens, but it’s also where most of us give up.

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When Medical Emergencies Attack Your Spouse

by Tim on July 28, 2011

In case you’ve wondered where we’ve been, we’ve had quite the chaos this month. The main crisis involved the rapid deterioration of Mary’s health early in the month. She started getting sick, and it got much worse. She was admitted to the hospital about three weeks ago, and she had major surgery a few days later.

I won’t go into all the gory details. I’ll let her do that if she wants to. The good news is that she should have a complete recovery. The scary news is that had she not understood her body well enough to know something was wrong and then gone to the hospital, she most likely would have died from this. Writing that sentence nearly caused me to go into hysterics just now.

The surgery was scheduled for 2-2.5 hours. She went back about 7:20AM. Surgery began at 8:00. About 10:00 I waited expectantly for the receptionist to answer the frequently-ringing phone and give us news that the surgeon would see us in Consult Room number whatever. At 11:00, we got a call that things were “going well” but they were still working, which can readily be translated to “we found some things we didn’t expect, and it’s going to take us longer than we thought.”

I sat in the surgical waiting area clamping down so hard on my teeth that I thought my jaws might break. I felt like there was some crazed animal inside me, a wave of terror I was going to vomit out. You don’t really begin to understand your life with clarity until you feel like you’re standing on the edge of an abyss.

11:30 came, then noon, then 12:30 – nothing. At 12:45, news that they were finishing up. It’d be 30-45 minutes. 1:30 passed, then 1:45 – nothing.

We all have nightmares of losing someone we love. Some live the nightmare for real. For those minutes, I was terrified about which side of that divide I was on. Every terror I could conjure roared through me. I’ve had a lifelong fear of water, and even the thought of drowning can send me into a full panic. In that waiting room, it’s that panic times ten that I started to feel. I clutched the “everything is going well it’s just taking longer” message like a life preserver.

After the longest half hour I can remember, at 2:00 the surgeon finally came in and told us things “went well” but that her condition had been more severe than they originally thought. She would recover and be OK, though it would and will take a while. But if she’d not had the surgery, she could have died. The nightmare was closer than we had known. I exhaled.

She would need a couple of hours in recovery, so I went and got something to eat. I wandered aimlessly in the little cafe in the hospital. I finally ended up sitting alone at a table eating a calzone. I started crying. Much of that was relief like a prisoner whose life was spared. The rest arose from the sheer enormity of what could have happened.

You wake up one day trying to plan for the start of kindergarten and what we might attempt to cobble together for a pseudo-staycation this summer, something to help us regroup even a little. Next thing you know you’re sidestepping death and living in a hospital for a couple of weeks.

It puts a lot of our regular chaos into perspective. I’d give anything right now for one of our so-called crazy, typical days at home. I’ve barely seen the kids in two weeks. Mary’s seen them basically once in the last three. They went to stay with Mary’s parents – 3.5 hours away – while we were at the hospital and to let Mary get home and begin to recover. Nothing is normal, and it won’t be for a while yet.

So I went back and forth the first week taking the J-Man to and from camp, getting him and Dale Jr. through the important parts of the day, attempting to help them understand something about what’s going on with Mama, running between the hospital and home, and trying to spend some time with Mary as she dealt with all this. Then there’s the day to day chores and administrivia of life that don’t take the month off just because you can’t handle it right now.

I lived at the hospital almost around the clock for a week and a half, running home when friends or family came by to relieve me so I could shower, do chores, and catch up on a few things. I miss the kids terribly. I just want to curl up with them in the recliner and watch the same TV show over and over again.

For as long as we can remember, we already felt like we’re going at 100% capacity all the time. Then something like this happens and you realize that it is somehow possible to deal with more. This then is some consolation we can carry forward from here on, but it would be nice if at some point things were easy even if just for a while.

What I’ve become most aware of this month is how good Mary and I are as a team. You never know how important someone is to you until you face an enormous challenge together and overcome it. Not just survive it, which is of course important in its own right, but overcome it by coming out better together on the other side.

This also has been true with our years with autism. It’s been our greatest challenge, and I think we’ve risen to meet it well. This month feels like a confirmation of that. Together we are strong. Our wedding anniversary is in a couple of weeks – our ninth – and through this we’ve learned that the most meaningful gift we can give to each other is each other and this confirmation of our combined strength.

I admit a certain jealousy for those parents with extensive local support networks of family and friends who allow them the option to work regularly, see movies in public, and generally have a life. But we’ve also learned that in the event of a great emergency, we have a support network of caring family and friends ready to step in. Without them, I don’t know how we would have gotten through this.

Now we’re home, Mary is recovering well, and the kids are coming back in a few hours. Life is returning slowly to normal. Sometimes life just gets blown to hell and you have no choice but to let all your daily things go. In one way, it’s strangely liberating. You’re forced to understand what really matters in life. The stuff of the everyday – even if it does have its own level of importance – takes its rightful place. There is a time to pay bills and a time to fill out forms. There is a time to vacuum floors and a time to do dishes. But more importantly, there is a time to enjoy your family and a time to love and be loved.

And there is a time to rejoice that what was almost lost has been made whole again and a time to take nothing for granted.

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Diagnosis Day and a Tale of Two Marathons

by Tim on March 19, 2011

Today is what we call Diagnosis Day, the day on which our J-Man was diagnosed with autism three years ago. We have in the past struggled with how one might observe Diagnosis Day or whether it’s necessary to really do so. In our “Diagnosis Day – 2nd Anniversary Edition” last year, we thought about it like the equivalent of renewing your wedding vows. Over time I’ve come to think of it as an opportunity to look back at how far we’ve come as a family in the past year, to give thanks for all those who have helped us, and to renew our commitment as parents and advocates to our children’s growth and to the rights of all children. But as we wrote about on that first Diagnosis Day, the vivid memories of that day always stay with you.

That day three years ago, I felt an entire range of emotions. I was angry, fired up, in despair, filled with resolve, weighed down with fear and every other emotion you could imagine, but most of all overflowing with love for my beloved son. The diagnosis brought a sense not of finality, as no future is ever completely written, but more that we were in this for the long haul now.

These therapies we’d been doing for much of his life weren’t a temporary detour from some other existence. We wouldn’t be taking any exits off this road any time soon. And the best thing we could do was make our peace with that, grieve whatever we needed to, and prepare ourselves for the journey ahead and all the adventures it would bring. The image that came to my mind repeatedly was that now we were running a marathon, and we needed to learn how to run that kind of race from here on.

People often see marathons as a dour battle against suffering and pain. Running is regularly thought of as painful, hard, and even unnatural. Many who ponder just the concept of trying to complete a marathon do so in terms of survival. This is unfortunate as I’ve learned that distance running is so unlike this. It is as much about the journey as completing a distance. It is about learning to put one foot in front of the other and piecing those small steps together into a far grander whole.

Running a marathon seems ludicrous to most of us, but taking that one next step doesn’t. We can be so overwhelmed by the enormity of things in our lives that we can’t even see past that let alone know all the steps we have to take to get where we hope to go. But give us a single, next step, and often we can do that much. And that’s exactly how a marathon is run. I tend to think that I’m not running these seemingly crazy distances; I’m just putting steps together, one after another, over and over again until I get there. This is how our lives can work.

Divide a challenge into its smallest parts, and in doing so we discover a way to overcome it. It is about realizing that what we perceive as our limits really aren’t, that we are so much stronger and more capable than we think we are. It is about going after what is possible rather than focusing on what seems impossible. It is about believing that you can come to the start line, answer the call to go, and somehow achieve something you’ve never done before.

I used to think I would never do something like run a marathon. Eight months ago, I was struggling just to get up off the couch. But in working these five-and-a-half years with this remarkable boy, I’ve learned that so much is possible if you just take one small step at a time and believe that somehow it’ll all add up to something amazing. I see how far I’ve come since I got up off that couch and decided to make big changes in my life, and I am astonished. I have a long way to go, but that’s OK. I will always believe that I wouldn’t have known how to come this far without our J-Man’s example to guide me.

Now our not-so-little-anymore wunderkind Dale Jr. is showing us to see life from yet more perspectives. He seems amazed at so much of his world, regardless of whether it’s something great or small. He just looks so in love with the world. His exuberance infects me and energizes me. He is our adventurous child, rarely afraid of diving into something. He explores and experiments, he creatively figures things out, and he is undeterred by anything. He soaks it all in and misses nothing.

Our two sons are developing differently, but in doing so they offer us a far richer understanding of the world than we would ever have otherwise. If the J-Man first taught me the path to achieving something great in my life, perhaps Dale Jr’s adventurous and exuberant spirit has taught me how to just believe, dive in, and go for it.

This year, and honestly quite by accident, I’m doing something completely different for Diagnosis Day. The marathon I’m running tomorrow just happened to fall on March 20th. They didn’t schedule it just for my benefit, of course, and besides I didn’t even connect the two until about a week ago. I don’t know why I didn’t before then. I had a whole set of reasons to take on this challenge, and the race falling on the same weekend as Diagnosis Day added the exclamation point on the end of the sentence.

So tomorrow I will celebrate everything I’ve learned from my kids and from my life. I will proclaim that even with all these challenges we face and all the effort they require, I am stronger than ever for it. I have come back from a difficult place in my life. When some people assume that parents of special needs children are doomed to an existence of unending struggle and despair, maybe now I can show them it is possible to be that parent and do some pretty kick-ass stuff. And tomorrow I’ll think a lot about my grandmother because I think that’s the kind of attitude she would appreciate and want me to follow in life.

Four or five hours after this weekend’s marathon begins, it will end. The marathon of our lives will continue on. But now I know how to run marathons. I know how to train for them. I know how to get up off the ground on the most difficult days and keep putting one step in front of another until my feet are solid under me again. And I know all this and more because of these courageous, adventurous, determined little boys who taught me to believe that what seems impossible never is.

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Two Be or Not Two Be?

by Tim on March 13, 2011

[This is a post written in two different eras of our lives. It's about the question we wrestled with for so long regarding whether to have a second child, which I thought of as "Two Be or Not Two Be?" The first part contains some thoughts I wrote in 2009 about three weeks before Dale Jr. was born. The second is reflections of where we are now.]

April 17, 2009

One of the most complicated and difficult decisions Mary and I have made together is whether and when to have a second child after our J-Man. We knew from before we got married that we wanted two kids. We understand ourselves well and accepted that our ability to provide the kind of attention we wanted to our children would drop exponentially after two, so that would definitely be our limit. It also felt like a nice, round number to us since, at least in theory, it meant that each of us could give one-on-one attention to our kids at any given time. Theory and practice often diverge someplace, but there is still value to us in the idea.

That sounds dynamite in theory until you add having a child with autism into the mix. It’s oddly common among parents I know that they have two children with their youngest child being autistic. It’s not much of a sample size for sure, and I’m not advancing any sort of theory here. For whatever reason, that just seems to be how it happens with parents around us. We have until now been the exception, and one that more people than just us have noticed.

One even more common trait that parents don’t really like to discuss is that for many of them their last child – no matter how many they have – is autistic. It’s not a dirty secret; it’s just something you quietly nod your head about and accept as an understandable decision. The time you invest in your children’s growth and well-being is immense. But it’s this particular issue that has piqued the curiosities of parents – with or without autistic kids – with regard to our decision to have another child after the J-Man.

Thankfully no one, at least to our faces, has questioned our judgment, though I imagine a few may have amongst themselves. But as with many things, we acknowledge the opinions of others and just move on with our lives. They had nothing to do with our decision.

I don’t recall us ever seriously considering not ever having a second child. There were a number of times we uttered, “I don’t know whether we can do this again” during the five-therapies-a-week periods. I know in deciding the timing of when to have a second child, there were plenty of days, weeks, and months where we quietly acknowledged that it wasn’t time yet.

Then there’s the thought no one is really proud of but every parent of an autistic child considering having another kid thinks about. Might as well be honest about it.

What if we have ‘another one’?

Obviously, parenting an autistic child is not some sort of disqualifier in having more kids. Plenty do. But you do have a huge decision to make with so many variables that it becomes an almost unsolvable equation. Studies are indicating that if you have an autistic child, you have somewhere between a 1-in-10 and 1-in-20 chance of having another. How do you feel about this? Will you be able to keep the level of attention going that your autistic child needs? Are you concerned about your ability to devote enough attention to each of your children? Can you afford care for each of your children? How will our child react to a new baby in the house? The list of questions can go on and on. You can paralyze yourself with them. And there are no clear answers. And I hate to disappoint you, but there never will be.

For us, I think it became a statement of faith in our relationship. Little did we realize how almost prophetic our wedding vows would become.

We shall keep together what share of trouble and sorrow our lives may lay upon us, and we shall hold together our store of goodness and plenty and love. When our way becomes difficult, I promise to stand by you and uplift you, so that through our union we can accomplish more than we could alone. I promise to honor and care for you, to speak the truth to you in love, and to cherish and encourage your own fulfillment through all the changes of our lives. I will stand beside you in joy or in sorrow, in ease and in conflict, putting the commitment we make today above any obstacle that we may face. This is my solemn vow.

We declared that day that we believe we can meet any challenge, and we realize now that our belief in that is stronger still. We have become pretty good parents when faced with a huge challenge. We’ve overcome and even thrived because we’ve discovered the frequent joy in these challenges. Most importantly, we’ve discovered that our J-Man is perfect the way he is and so full of love that it amazes us that his little body can hold it all in. And we believe our love for him can transcend those challenges and help us regardless of what comes next.

We did decide to have an amnio this time around. I was a little hesitant about this because while I know the risk to the baby in an amnio is very low, I’m not one who fully appreciates those kinds of statistical nuances. It was quick and fairly easy and we had the preliminary results in a couple of days – negative for all the quick and obvious stuff. We received the full report a few days after that, negative for everything they can test for. I must say that I liked having the amnio done more than I liked the idea of doing it beforehand.

We know there’s no test for autism, nor are there tests for a host of other health issues that might be part of his life. Life has few guarantees, and waiting on them will just do you in. It is nice to know certain things, however, even though nothing the report could have said would have affected us having the baby. Our rationale was that if something came back positive, we’d have time to prepare. Given how most of our lives are shaped by autism and the J-Man’s many needs, if the arc of our lives was going to have to bend toward another direction, we needed to know.

I am certainly not saying everyone in this situation should decide to have another child. This is simply how we arrived at our decision. We are nervous and excited, but most of all, we are deep-down at peace with our decision and can’t wait until we get to welcome our new little wonder into the world.

March 13, 2011

Dale Jr. is almost two now, and we have long since passed the point where we remember much about life without him. So much of what we worried about then seems like a distant memory now.

We got off to a sometimes rocky start, and our J-Man did regress pretty significantly for most of a semester at school. But we were determined to get us all out the other side, and we did that with the support of so many wonderful people. That’s as much a testament to the J-Man’s courage and determination as anything.

Is life with two challenging? You bet, but whoever said ‘challenging’ is by default a negative we should all avoid may not understand the concept very well. Great challenges often produce even greater joys.

Dale Jr. is pretty easy-going, has a wonderful sense of humor, is kind and loving, and is adored by everyone who meets him – just like they should! Many days feel like we have to relearn parenting, but that’s to be expected. Both our kids grow and change quickly. Every day brings a new discovery.

Life is often far more chaotic than I would prefer, but that’s largely about me and my still developing skills at coping with unpredictability and time management (such as that ever can be managed). But we’ve learned that we can fly pretty well by the seat of our pants and figure out much of what we need as we go. It calls forth the best of who we are and can be, and that is a wonderful thing.

We made the right decision for us at the time in which it was right for us. It’s important to keep both those things in mind as you think about having more children. This is true whether your children have autism, something else, or are considered ‘typically-developing’. I believe we do have a responsibility to our children to make decisions that are right for them. I definitely don’t think it should matter one bit to you what we’re doing or what anyone else decided to do. You have to look at your own relationship to each other as spouses and to your children as parents, your children and where they are in their lives, and the time and circumstances of life you are in right now, and then make the best decision you can based on that.

This is likely not the straight answer you were hoping for, but there’s never going to be an easy answer. If I have any guidance from there it’s to say, acknowledge those feelings of discouragement, uncertainty, overwhelm, and fear and patiently look for those more quiet moments where reflection is possible. I know in our chaotic lives that those can be very rare, but even a few seconds here and there can be enough. In time, you can gather up enough of these bits and pieces of reflections out of which the insight you’re looking for will arise.

Trust that you will make the right decision for your family, and I believe that will put you in a frame of mind where you will.

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Burnout

by Tim on July 27, 2010

Athletes call the moment when they completely run out of fuel and their bodies shut down ‘bonking’ or ‘hitting the wall’. But it doesn’t just happen to athletes; it happens to us, too.

For the past few weeks, I think even those terms don’t do justice to how I’ve felt. It’s been like driving into the wall, having the wall fall on top of me, and then just staying buried there. Though for such a simple-sounding word, I think ‘burnout’ covers it pretty well. And I’m ready to be done with it.

After your body uses up its normal exercise fuel, it starts consuming less efficient sources of energy inside you. Your body goes through whatever else it can find to keep going, even up to consuming itself. Even with all that, though, you can typically cease your efforts for a bit, eat something, regroup, and start again.

Burnout in daily life is not only a complete lack of energy but a lack of any fuel to restart again or any good way to get it. Slowing down, taking a breather, eating a little, and trying again tomorrow isn’t a recovery plan for burnout; it’s a joke. When a body is malnourished and all the carbohydrates and fats and whatever else are used up, your body starts consuming tissues and other cells. It will literally eat itself alive until there’s nothing left in an effort to survive. I think burnout is the psychological, emotional, and spiritual equivalent of such malnourishment.

Burnout turns you into a complete, selfish ass because your total lack of everything causes you to turn within yourself in search of something – anything – else to burn. It’s a vicious cycle, a black hole – the worse it gets, the worse it gets still. You eat yourself alive until you start feeling like just a shell.

This is how I was getting. I won’t speak for Mary, but I imagine little of what I’m saying would differ from how she’d describe her life lately. This has been a rough year for us – a lot of death and dying, health issues all around, the constant demands of parenting that rarely let up for a minute, all sorts of work pressures, and the constant refrain of autism that weaves through so much of our lives.

Just as bad is that I was losing patience and compassion with everyone and myself. The only struggle I could see and feel was mine. I couldn’t step outside myself even a fraction to empathize with what the kids or Mary or anyone else in our lives were going through. I was losing all appreciation of the wonders and joys in my own house, the goodness of people, all the living saints we spend time with and read about and interact with online every day. I had withdrawn into myself. I don’t say this to beat myself up. I say it as a realization that I was in a place I couldn’t remain so maybe some of you will see it in your own lives.

While we weren’t completely sure Dale Jr. was ready to be away from us for a few days, we knew that we were at a desperation point of complete exhaustion. We decided to take my older sister up on her offer to watch the J-Man and Dale Jr. for a few days while Mary and I went away. People suggested all these places we could go and all the ‘fun’ activities we could do. But all of our days are already doing one thing after another. All we wanted was to become unconscious for a few days.

We found an isolated cabin in the woods away from people and the Internet and just about everything else. It did have a hot tub, though, which was an absolute requirement. Groceries and whatnot were nearby when we needed them. It had enough amenities for us to be comfortable. We were only an hour away from my sister’s family if something did come up.

And there we stayed for a week. I slept 16 hours before the first day was done. I can go a good part of a week without getting to sleep that much. After a couple of days of sleeping, reading, eating, hot tubbing, sleeping, movie watching, and sleeping, I began to feel the frayed ends of my nerves knitting themselves back together again a thread at a time.

I finally got into a state where I could start to look outside myself again. I thought about all the goodness I’ve received or witnessed these past few weeks, even though at the time I was too drawn into myself to really appreciate it. I reflected too on the hardships of others, most unfair, some tragic. I had been off absorbed with my own wounds to see and understand before.

There are all of the J-Man’s teachers and therapists at school who work so hard for him and generously share so much of their expertise, wisdom, understanding, and kindness with us. They worked to get him into a two-week camp for autistic kids at a local YMCA so he could have structured activity in a supportive environment with other kids, and we could have a couple of weeks during summer break where we could get some stuff done during the day. The camp staff were so wonderful. They did such a great job with our J-Man, guiding him through a completely new experience (his first time at camp) with a much different schedule than he’s used to. By the start of the second week, he really started to get the hang of things and enjoy himself. And the camp staff loved him so much.

Obviously, family have also pitched in their kindness to help us out lately. Mary’s parents kept the J-Man for a few days, and my sister had them for our week away. These breaks are lifesavers for us. We need time to recharge, and there just are not many people with whom we could leave either of our kids, let alone both of them.

There were also painful, and even tragic, things that happened recently to friends of ours. One of the J-Man’s classmates from last year, his family lost their home and everything they own to fire. They are good people trying to do the right thing; they struggle financially already. People like them should be exempt from things like this. I cannot even begin to imagine how awful this was and still is for them.

For me, what came as grace was the response that poured out to help them get back on their feet again. The word went out about their immediate needs, and within a couple of days those more tangible needs were met by numerous people who answered that call for help. The word went out again for basic furniture and household items they’d need to move into another trailer. Within a couple more days, all the needs on that list were fulfilled. To witness all the kindness and care that poured out to this family injected a dose of new life into me. It reminded me of the fundamental goodness and generosity of others.

And this is one of the fundamental truths we hopefully learn as parents of autistic children: There are more of these good, kind, generous, skilled, loving people out there looking out for us, helping us, willing to give their time and talent to us than we can count. Sure there are always some people trying to get in our way, take stuff from us, and make our lives miserable, but I’ve found they are by far the minority. Pulling back for some perspective has reminded me of this.

As our vacation neared the end, I could feel my pulse quicken and my breath get shallower and more rapid. I knew it was fear, fear of going back to where I could be hyperstressed and exhausted and burned out again. But at least I know getting a few days away will be an option for us again down the road. I know that trying to focus more intentionally on all the great people around us opens me up to being refilled by their kindness and understanding.

And I know all that is good and perfect in my life far outweighs the challenges, frustrations, and fear. Perhaps I wrote all this to get to that one sentence, but maybe it’s the one I need to walk away from this vacation with and carry around with me from now on.

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Our Ideal Vacation

May 13, 2010

After the complete suck that the last several weeks have been, we needed to think about something more positive. Regular vacations are often a complete ordeal. It’s the same trials and tribulations as at home only we can’t find anything, and nothing is familiar because we’re not at home. I’m so exhausted right now that [...]

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Trying to Get Perspective

November 29, 2009

These past weeks have been a serious reality check for us. All of us have been sick, hurt, or both at one point or another. Not surprisingly, this has weakened both our physical and emotional defenses. That’s a nice way of saying that we’ve turned into a bunch of grumpy, rundown, sick people who aren’t [...]

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