When your baby is born, it’s without a doubt the best day of your life. The start of a new chapter. The sleepless nights and all the fuss follow one after another, but it’s actually not too bad overall—take it from a mom who’s completely smitten with her baby.
The years go by, and we experience both wonderful moments and the most difficult ones, but nothing compares to what every parent fears—that thing we dare not speak of: the news of an illness. We mistakenly believe that it happens to others—that they’re the unlucky ones. We’d do anything to help them and try to ease their pain and their sense of profound injustice.
But when it happens to our own children, it’s as if, in a split second, we’re inside their heads—we feel their emotions, and our hearts are pounding wildly. We go through the stages—the shock, the questions, the acceptance… everything comes rushing in. We begin a long process of medical tests, and throughout it all, we realize we’re not alone; these specialists are there for us, appointment after appointment. They’re part of this new chapter in our child’s life.
Later on, we meet those other parents for whom we had all the empathy in the world, and now—well—we understand each other. No matter what illness their child has, the way we’re living through it is similar, and that creates this bond, this support. All that strength, all that love, carries us, because our minds are elsewhere more often than not—only our feet are planted on the ground.
One day, the moment comes when the dust settles and the name of that illness becomes a foreign concept to us. We can still see the beauty in things—our child is doing well, given the circumstances, even better than we are. It could have been much worse, and we take comfort in that; we cling to the positive, to life. At that moment, we know how fragile it is. This new beginning will happen whether we want it to or not, so we might as well embrace it as a family, surrounded by loved ones.
Take two—this is the one. It will be full of hope and will make us better people as we surround our little bundle of joy, who is thriving and smiling at life, carrying this illness as part of her journey.