Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Steady As We Go

Hiiiiiiiiii! Hi Universe! Hi, and thank you sooooooo much for punching me in the face yesterday. YOU. ROCK.

A few things: Now is the time for us to start noticing changes in Penelope. Changes that have the potential to shape the rest of her educational needs, emotional development and social integration.

These things are known, have been known and have been playing a kind of demonic hide & seek for some time in my mind (I picture eight or nine little girls dressed in ragged night-gowns, hair in ratty strands, skin pale and nearly translucent, bouncing in freakish rhythms with arms akimbo and knees out at odd angles waiting to pounce through the cellar door one at a time. Scary. It's scary). Hot husband said something so smart about her yesterday, he said: "We can't not be prepared, we have to be ready for what's coming so we're not able to just live in the moment with her, we have to be ready". So, you know, we wait. We live and love and we wait. And me? I'm always kinda a leeeetle bit worried.

Well, one of those freaky little bitches popped out of the door.

And the kick to the gut was fairly awful. The shock knocked us down. We had no words.

I probably need to come up with a better metaphor for this, but grief is one tricky, nasty beast. It hangs on, man. And yesterday I cried (not easy with my post-op eyes, I assure you) and cried and worried with my lovely husband if we'd be able to save Penelope from a life of loneliness and struggles because of her increasing inability to control her impulses, to get along, to play nice, to fit in. Will she isolate everyone to the point of well, isolation?

Falling behind in school I can handle, I can get tutors (and math can kiss my ass, anyway). Falling behind in life is unbearable. That is a heartbreak I have no framework for. So guess what? We're going to build one.

Late in the day yesterday, looking across the kitchen at my achingly handsome man nod in agreement as I said that we're so lucky that we have each other, that this kind of thing tears families apart and demolishes relationships and that is not our destiny, goddamnit; that was some beautiful shit. And then when he said that we'll do it, we'll help her, she will be ok. We'll all be fucking great; that was even better.

Take that universe. TAKE THAT.


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