Faking Normal

What happened to my life? It used to be normal. It had its stressors but basically it hummed along. I’d wake up around 8:00am, get Lincoln and feed him breakfast. We would send Ron off to work and then figure out what to do for the day. Was it Gymboree? Was it a grocery shopping? Should we just stay at home and bum around?

Sadly I thought my life was hard. I chuckle at what a dope I was. Or maybe I am actually choking back the tears for what I have lost. It’s hard to tell some days.

Why am I writing about normal? Recently I blogged that things were normal here. They are but not in the same way it is for other families. It’s hard to describe.

I recently read this blog post where a woman writes about living with a disability. She writes:
"Acquiring (or having a child with) a disability is a bit like getting home to find there's a gorilla in your house. You contact the approved and official channels to get rid of infestations of wild animals (in this case, the provincial medical services) and they umm and aah and suck air in through their teeth before saying something roughly equivalent to "what you've got 'ere, mate, is a gorilla, and there ain't really a lot what we can do about them, see..." before sending you back home to the gorilla's waiting arms."

I think my favorite line in this post is: “...while ignoring the massive pile of steaming gorilla-turds in your bedroom every morning and night, not to mention your weekly bill for bananas.” Cracks me up.

Anyway, she writes there are three things you can do about your gorilla:
1. Ignore it…this is denial at its best;
2. Force it out which, in most cases, is a losing battle; OR
3. Learn to live with it.

I realized after reading the gorilla post that no one understands our normal and as I've said, it's hard to explain it. This gorilla post helps.

Here at Colby Haus we have learned to fake it pretty good. We run around pretending everything is fine when in fact we are always aware of the gorilla or rather the elephant (I’ve always said elephant because of that old ‘elephant in the room’ expression). In truth, we deal with the elephant every day. It impacts our lives every single day because it is large. It is round. It is heavy and it is never going to go away.

Life with an elephant is not easy. It can rule our life. It can keep us from doing things. It is constantly there reminding us that even though we may not be facing a crisis this very second, things could very easily spin out of control. (Poor Ron to this day still fears phone calls from me. He worries I’ll say something is wrong.) It’s a sucky elephant. It’s not a lot of fun to have around.

Ugh. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish this life were simple. I wish our normal was just like everyone else’s. I wish I could say that Xander’s medical career is over but truth is it isn’t. I can only hope it isn’t an extensive one.

And here we are, left with those three options of how to cope with the elephant; ignore it, force it out or learn to live with it. The obvious answer is to learn to live with it but it’s hard. It’s going to take a long, long time to get used to the elephant. It's a really big elephant.

So for now, we're left with faking normal. We'll just keep doing the best we can until we get it all figured out. Hopefully our children will never know the difference.