Jet Lag

Poppa here.

I see no value in thinking about the future. My method of making sense of what's going on with Gommy is to remain grounded in the here and now. The present is filled with fantastic things happening...like yesterday our sweet gommy rolled from back to belly and pushed up in to a crawling position as if it were nothing. The present is filled with lots of happiness.

The future on the other hand is filled with uncertainty, and is therefore petrifying to me. Schools, bullies, social life, family life...all that stuff is something I don't like thinking about because I have no real influence over it. So the way that I parent is by being intensely focused on this moment right here...almost to a fault.

To that end, getting over our incredibly depressing (no other way to phrase it) Seattle trip was similar to getting over jet lag. For those three hours at the clinic we were face to face with our future. We were thrust into a completely unfamiliar world...filled with concerns about saving enough money and life expectancy issues among other things. It was terrible. Beneficial, in some senses, but terrible all the same. Adjusting back to our normal life after having spent time in a completely different time zone (aka the future) was difficult, but I think we're at a good place now.

Here's the thing...were those projections based on who Gommy is, or simply based on a static image of his brain? I think the latter, which makes me quicker to not necessarily dismiss them, but take them less seriously. A picture of his brain does not properly convey how smart, capable, and driven my beautiful son is. It cannot, and it will not. So I refuse to accept a future based on one static image.

In the grand scheme of things, projections don't mean much. This past weekend I was flipping through pictures of our boys, and I found a few from well before our PMG diganosis. If I were to have made a projection based on that static image, I would have said "well this kid is happy, and giggles uncontrollably (for some reason) when i stick my nose in his mouth. He's also more social than his brother was at this age. He's a little tight, but nothing overly concerning"

That's it.

So what's changed? Maybe we know a little more about his brain and what it looks like, but we have no idea what its capable of...so why bother pretending that I can predict the future, for good or for bad? Why put myself in a different time zone when I know that I struggle with jet lag?

When Gommy flipped over and pushed up, Twisty and I were celebrating, fist bumping and wiping tears. But Gommy was going about his day as if it were nothing because NO ONE HAS TOLD HIM HE'S INCAPABLE OF DOING REMARKABLE THINGS. He's happy. He's capable. No one has told him that the future is sad or scary or anything. So if he doesn't care about the future, why the hell should I be freaking out about it? Why on earth should my ego, my fears, my doubts, and my own neuroses impact my approach to the here and now?

I'm over my jet lag. I'm done with the future. Our fam is too damn busy kicking ass in the present.