Normality

It is sad, really.  Currently, our family’s life is pretty normal.  No big issues or concerns outside the normal ones that most families have.  No abnormal crises.  No looming disasters on the horizon other than the normal storms that every family has to navigate around.  Yet, here I sit, waiting for the ‘other shoe’ to drop.  You see, in a family with a child with special needs, periods of normalcy are almost scary.  These times just do not happen. 

    

If things seem normal, then it cannot be good.  We must have missed something.  Somewhere, somehow, there must be something that was overlooked.   Families like ours just are not allowed to have normalcy.  As much as we want that comfortable feeling of issues that are ‘normal’ in a family, we know that when you have a child with special needs, such comfort only means a nasty surprise.  Instead we dread such periods, looking for that nasty other shoe.  You see, the Fates to not permit us the luxury or the comfort of being able to relax.  The more that we begin to feel like we can let our guard down, the more the hair on the back of our necks begin to stand up and tingle.

   

You see, those of us that live in the special needs world feel most at home and most comfortable when the crisis is happening.  We spend so many years bouncing from near disaster to near disaster that we don’t know what to do with ourselves when we haven’t just ridden out of one and aren’t looking down the maw of another.  For 20+ years, the ride has felt like a continuing sequel to the “Indiana Jones” movies.  As a parent, you get so used to surviving one scrape to the next.  Surviving and pushing forward, winning some, losing some, but moving forward.  You don’t really believe there is a true finish line.  Maybe there is.  Who knows….

  

All I know right now is that while I want to believe, like the two antelope with night vision goggles in that new insurance commercial, I certainly do not plan on letting my guard down.  Maybe if I’m lucky, and this trend continues, in about ten years I might be able to relax…..