I don't think I was always a glass half empty kind of girl. I am not suggesting that I was ever a positive outlook glass always full kind of girl either but I probably fell somewhere in the middle. Sometimes positive and sometimes negative. I will say though, that some of my more recent experiences in the past few years have changed that. Where I was once solidly in the middle, I would definitely say that today, I have slipped over the line and am now pretty ensconced in the glass half empty world.
As a result, I find that I often focus on the difficulties and the challenges of my situation and I do not often enough stop to see the good. I have a friend, who always tells me that in the business of raising our special needs children it is always one step forward and two steps back. Every time she says that, I am reminded of that annoying game I used to play in camp called John Jacob Jingelheimer Schmidt (or something like that) where you would walk forward singing a song and then double it up backwards and end up where you started. That game really must have annoyed our counselors to no end since it always took so long to get where we were going. I would say that game is a perfect metaphor for my life. I somehow feel like I am on a moving sidewalk but it is not really taking us forward. In a sense I am often watching others pass me by but never quite reaching my goals or getting where I am hoping to be.
This week though, felt different. I mentioned once, in a previous posting, that it is difficult to describe what is is like when my special needs child succeeds at something. It is euphoric, it is better than anything you can imagine. It is that much greater because I know just how difficult it is for him to do things that are so simple and obvious to others. If you bumped into me just two weeks ago you would have probably noticed that I was having a complete melt down (there were quite a few people to have that misfortune). All I could think was "I will not make it through this weekend or this life". I was in a pretty bad place. And then, just when I felt I really couldn't any more, my son turns around and shows me that we can.
For years, and I mean that literally, we have been trying to get him fully toilet trained. (I hope this isn't too much information for some of you but I really want to share it.) He has been peeing on the toilet already for a few years but has been having a lot of difficulty with the other part. I really thought that I would be cleaning up poop accidents for the rest of my life. Then suddenly, one day, he just plain figured it out. It took a lot of hard work on all of our parts but it felt like a miracle and now (knock on wood) I have not cleaned even a single accident in almost 2 weeks. It is literally astonoshing. He wakes up in the morning, takes himself to the toilet, does his business and then comes and lets me know what he has done. You know, like any normal kid! I truly never thought we would be here, and now, we are.
If that is not enough, in this same two week period my son, for the first time basically ever, has expressed interest in a friend. He has been trying to play with our friends daughter for the last two weeks. While we have a ways to go with social interactions, it is possibly the first time that he has sought out a friend and really wanted to play with her. It is amazing. But wait, there is more! Last night, for the first time ever, he asked me to read him a book and he sat through the entire story. Twice! I have never been able to read him a book before because generally after the first page (if we even get that far) he becomes uninterested.
I know I usually use this as a forum to speak about the challenges and struggles that we face but I really wanted to share the successes as well. Often they are few and far between, but these amazing achievements can really help to carry me through the next few storms. They will make me smile and believe that really, the sky is the limit and if we simply believe in Yonatan and support him, who knows what he can achieve. Hey, one day he may even be The Post Master General!
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