Aftermath

I learned more about Maggie's wheelchair falling over when she came home from school. Apparently it wasn't such a slow fall*, but a crash and she landed a little to her side. The driver stopped the bus on the hill in the middle of traffic to fix things. Her nurse said Maggie was shaking with fear, but physically unhurt.

I called the classroom to check on her before I went to the dentist because I knew I would be out of touch for a while. The teacher said she was working and happy so I didn't worry. I knew, though that there would be more when she came home. And there was.

Her physical therapist comes on Tuesdays to work with Maggie in the walker. This is very difficult for Maggie. She is never upright and it's a bit scary.  I'm sure you can figure out what happened. As soon as we put her in the walker she started to melt down. This has happened before, but this time it was different. Maggie was inconsolable. We immediately took her out and put her in the chair, but she could not stop crying. After a few minutes I took her out of the chair and sat with her on the couch while she just cried out all her fear.

It would have broken your heart. She was so sad and so frightened and all the hugs and kisses and reassurance could not make it go away. It was the exact same reaction she had when her wheelchair fell over in middle school. She waited until she got home to mom and then completely fell apart. She finally recovered after about 45 minutes of solid crying. By then she was exhausted. So was I.

When her bus arrived this morning her regular driver was back (that was a sub yesterday.) He knew what happened and took no offense when I said, Please use the tie downs.

They got to school without incident.

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*no one told me it went over slowly, I think I just saw it that way in my mind and wanted to believe it.

Balancing Act

My secret to happiness lies in the balance of the good and bad things in my life. I write to demonstrate some of the wondrous things that we experience with Maggie. It is a positive view of a life filled with joy and love.  Obviously there are very difficult things that happen everyday and, while I don’t want to dwell on them, I write about those too.  The challenges Maggie faces and how we handle those is the interesting part of our lives. While they do not define us, the challenges certainly shape us. Neither the joy nor the problems are interesting on their own. It is finding the joy in the mist of those difficulties that makes our life interesting.

We find our balance, but it is not easy. We walk a tight rope every single day. There is no net, but we are high up on that rope inching forward all the time. We get to the other side, turn around and come back again. We are not doing it to impress anyone; it is not for show. It is just our life.  Most people don’t even know we are up there because they are busy with their own lives on the ground where maintaining balance is a little easier.    

We can stay on that tightrope only with the balance.  It is a delicate matter of finding joy in the dark, of grabbing those couple of great minutes after hours of dealing with a problem. Perhaps I can appreciate those wonderful few minutes only because of the hard hours that preceded them.  The lows are low and the highs are high, we need both to maintain balance.  I do not expect anyone to completely understand that, but I certainly appreciate it when people respect it, which almost everyone does.

Yesterday I encountered someone whose philosophy does not acknowledge the tightrope or the balance.  She “teaches happiness” and says we can all be happy by simply deciding to be and if we all made that decision problems would disappear, there would be no sadness in the world and the roads would be paved with lollipops.  That is simply not true. I make the best of my situation every single day. I have a positive attitude and consider myself a very happy person, but I cannot make Maggie’s problems go away. That makes me sad and the sadness is valid.  It is not that I am happy DESPITE the sadness, I think I am happy in part BECAUSE OF the sadness. I am proud of that.  I was deeply offended by her simplistic outlook, which ignored the proudest parts of our lives and the hard work we do.

 She knew I was not buying in to her philosophy and wanted to know why. As I tried to express my concerns and frustrations my voice cracked.  That surprised me. It hit me much harder than I realized. I knew then I was going to lose it and I just got out of there. I’m generally the first one to stand and fight, but It was “fight or flight” and I flew.  

 It’s back to the tightrope for me. There is a possibility that a person who leaves a "Happiness Class" in tears may be slightly out of balance. Or maybe I was providing the balance.  Who knows?

 I would take a bow, but I might fall over. 

Face this

Yesterday morning Mag and I were going through the morning routine. I was chatting and asking her questions. She was laughing and answering "Yes" and "No" with her hands. She was headed to the museum with Dad and was excited and happy. She was having so much fun I grabbed the camera. This was her smiling face:

Then I asked her if she had fun visiting her friend on Saturday. Her friend had surgery on Tuesday and is in the hospital. Maggie and I went up there to visit. The child is doing well, but there is pain, for sure. She, like Maggie, cannot talk and uses a wheelchair. When they tried to move her to the chair, her pain was obvious. As soon as I brought up the visit, Maggie's whole affect changed. She stopped laughing and looked at me like this:

She was trying not to cry. I still had the camera and asked if she was worried about her friend and she gave me a very slow "yes"response. I reassured Maggie that her friend was on the mend and that she, like Maggie, is a tough chick. That cheered her up a little.

I'm sorry that I made her sad, but I'm so proud of her for worrying about her friend and for her ability to convey that. She's was laughing again in just a couple of minutes. Don't worry.

You can tell why it's not hard for me to understand her. She's pretty clear.