Strength from Struggle?
Dad reads all these posts.
He’s 97 (91 in the picture).
He does email and Zoom.
He’s on Facebook.
Went zip lining through a Panamanian rain forest last year.
He just got a motorized bike and was putting it together when I called yesterday. lol
Yesterday’s piece was about how our kids give us strength.
Dad wrote back saying he didn’t remember the part about my almost dying brother putting the surgeons in their place, and that “We really did struggle.”
Mom used to tell me whole swaths of her memory were missing.
…Supreme intelligence of the human species…
Trauma protection.
Activated survival instinct.
She thought it was a deficit.
Something was wrong with her.
She and Dad planned four funerals for my brother before he was ten, according to a family friend.
The way I understood the situation, as a little sister, was that his bones were going to disintegrate and he would die by the time he was seven.
My brother survived.
It was a roller coaster life of hope to acceptance to hope.
My dad gave up hope once.
He didn’t see the point of putting my brother through a hideous surgery, given the odds.
Mom didn’t settle.
They went through ups and downs.
For years.
Then he stopped getting sick and lived pretty happily ever after.
Here’s the podcast interview I did with Dad a few years ago about his experience as a parent.
https://open.spotify.com/
—Julie
P.S. Please share with someone who has a child with a life threatening illness.
They need to hear how it doesn’t always go the way doctors predict.
