Last night, Lauren and I went for the fifth year in a row to see The Nutcracker. It is put on by a local ballet company and since they change things from year to year, it's never the same. I was remarking to her that next year hopefully we would be able to go together, but it's a possibly she might be spending Thanksgiving of 2014 with new friends from college. Especially, since the furthest school she has been accepted to is over five hours away :) I told her something like, "I have you now, so let's enjoy it." I spend time (more than I should) worrying about what the future holds. The realization that I have finally came to at the ripe old age of 50, is that when I do that, I kind of lose that precious time of "living in the moment." After multiple eye tests over the past few months, it's been pretty much determined that I have glaucoma. That type of eye disease is a sneaky one, you basically don't know that you have it until you have lost permanent vision. I could spend time worrying about losing my vision, or I can make sure I take the eye drops that the eye specialist prescribed. To me it's a no brainer. It takes all of 15 seconds to do my drops and that little bit of time is well worth the results. Back in 2006, I started having pain in my left knee. After some testing, it was determined I needed surgery. I remember very distinctly what the surgeon said. He said, "you can live in pain or have the surgery." Hmm, it took me all of a minute to decide to have the surgery. I said, "I have two kids and I want to be able to sit on the floor and play with them!" I think it blew my mother-in-law's mind at the time when I had the surgery, because from the diagnosis until the surgery was less than two weeks! I was like, "if I can do something to fix it, why won't I do it?" We all have things that we worry about. Nobody is immune from that. We worry about our spouses/significant others, our kids, jobs, aging parents. The list goes on and on. The trick is not letting all of that worrying consume our day-to-day lives. Life is short and everyday is a new one. There is no rewind button, you can't go back in time. All you can do is keep going forward. Focus on what you have, not on what you don't. As we head into the holidays, how will you "live in the moment?"
When Dominic was diagnosed with Autism at 2 1/2, I went to our local library and took out every book I could find about Autism. Sometimes I would bring back 20 books. This was 2006, so a lot of the information was very "dated." I guess I was looking for a book that would tell me what I should do next, like a "manual." Autism doesn't quite work that way! The saying is, " if you know one person with Autism, you know one person with Autism." Every mom to an individual with Autism follows their own "path." I think as moms, we judge ourselves much harder than anyone else does. I was 41 when I had Dominic. Did he get the diagnosis of Autism because I was an older mom? because I drank a lot of pop? I could sit and think about that every minute of every day. I am pretty integrated into the Autism community around Lansing and have told more than one person that it took me about two weeks to come to terms with Dominic's diagnosis. It is so incredib...
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