Reading something a family member recently wrote on her blog has me thinking a lot the past few days about why bad, or hard, things happen to us? I think it is probably one of the greatest, unanswered questions of life. How do we reconcile our ability to guide our lives, through our choices and goals that we set, with the uncontrollable aspect that is this human condition?
I have been sort of dwelling on this subject the past few days from the perspective of my own life. I have had my share of moments in life where I was asking, why me or why did this have to happen. I remember distinctly the day my sister died, leaving our downstairs office, where she had been sleeping and where she died, going into the kitchen and basically falling to the floor, thinking how did this happen? That feeling of being caught unaware is something I can remember like it was yesterday and honestly, a moment I try not to relive too often.
I had been raised in a very religious family and during the course of my sister's illness many, many people had been praying for her or fasting for her and I had been taught that there was someone out there who listened to these prayers. After her death, I felt like I had just been sold oceanfront property in Arizona. I had been sold on something that I, in my immature 14 year old state, thought was going to make good things happen for me and for my family. And then she died. In my mind, we had done everything right and by the rules and still had this tragic outcome. Why?
In adulthood, when my oldest was born with developmental disabilities and mild cerebral palsy, I was again brought back to the why, why me. I had done everything by the book during my pregnancy. I avoided shellfish, I didn't highlight my hair, I even gave up (gasp!) Diet Coke and yet I had a baby who they think suffered a stroke in
utero and had damage to his brain. I felt like I had already done abnormal childhood with the 4 years of cancer and then death, thank you very much, and now my mothering experience was also going to be atypical? Seriously? Pick on someone else.
Literally for a good year, I hated everyone who managed to have a healthy, typically developing baby. I would go to these coffee
klatch/
play date things where the moms chat and the toddlers play and I would seethe inside. While they were raving about how Susie walked early, how Johnny could speak in sentences or how
McKayla potty trained herself, I would sit there with a smile on my face but inside feel rage. What did they do that I didn't? Didn't I deserve that as much as them? Didn't my son deserve to live unfettered by therapies and differences and limitations? This was not the way I wanted things to go.
I wish I could say that those experiences brought me some magic answer as to why really, really hard things happen in life but I don't really have that answer. For myself, time and maturity have made me realize that there is a lot in life we can't control. All we have control over is what we decide to do about it or our reaction to it. In the instance of my sister's death, I eventually came to terms with the fact that it was just one of those freakish things. Her cells mutated and made tumors basically for no reason. It was a big, big lesson early on in my life that the universe is beyond our control and that fact makes life a little bit scary and really hard at times.
Now, I can't say that realizing that made it any easier to adapt to my son's situation or other hard things that have come up in life. I still have to spend time being angry and adjusting to a new reality. I think no matter how zen you are about these things, you still have to go through all those emotions but then eventually you have to surrender to the reality you have or else you will be stuck. In the situation with my son, I let myself be stuck and angry probably longer than I should have but these things in life aren't always so easy to mind over matter yourself out of.
Not sure if I have a point here but just wanted to share what has been swirling in my brain the past few days.
