“Our child is not physically sick… he is mentally sick. We see no difference. He needed a hospital. He needs prayers and support. When he returns to school, please treat him like any other friend who just got out of the hospital. High fives full of welcome backs and ‘I’m glad you’re okay.’ Please don’t be afraid to talk.”
“My life was quickly thrown upside down. The love of my life was suddenly killed in a car accident. I handled it with anger and bitterness. The economy began to crumble. I quickly became the best possible cab driver I could be. Shifts were 12 hours long. I pulled my boots up and reinvented myself. Then everything changed again. The ginger ale sat on the kitchen counter, slowly turning into a bomb. At the exact second Shelly passed the sink, the bottle exploded. I was horrified. What a battle it has been.”
“While rocking Azariah to sleep for his nap, he went stiff in my arms. I turned the light on and things changed drastically. He started to convulse and foam at the mouth. I ran downstairs and called 911. Two minutes went by and he was turning blue. I lay him down and gave him 3 breaths. ‘How in the world did this happen to OUR son, why OUR son?’ No one else in the world was known to have the same genetic deletions.”
“His only symptom was a fever that lasted no more than an hour or two. I gave him some Tylenol he spat out. He went to sleep soundly. He was perfectly fine. His fever was completely gone, he was in great spirits, and his coloring was healthy. This was not a sick kid.”
“My child just received an autism diagnosis. Where do I go from here? You read gossip magazines and watch reality TV so your brain can recoup from too many foreign medical words learned in therapy. You clean out a junk drawer in order to control what we still can. But now it’s done. No more limbo.”
“What absolutely nobody told us was at some point, no matter how much we loved each other, there would come a time when things felt broken beyond repair. We had seen couples split. Even couples we admired. But we figured that kind of brokenness was for people who didn’t love one another as much as we did. Like I said, we were young.”
“It was EXTREMELY rare. After hearing the news, we walked across the street and got pedicures, because what else do you do when you find out you’re pregnant with triplets? After already having twins! I don’t think we said a word to each other the entire time – we were completely dumbfounded.”
“It started when he was a newborn. Family and friends saying I held him too much and I was going to spoil him.”
“‘I survived on no sleep, why does she think she’s so special?’ Look no further than a woman if you want a raw, unadulterated version of guilt on steroids. We seem almost destined to fail (or feel as if we’re failing) because of one primary assumption made of us — that we must participate constantly in our children’s lives. That’s the expectation.”
“I was at work. One of my customers said, ‘How are you?’ I wanted to be honest. Test the waters on speaking how I really feel. ‘Ya know, I’m not doing too great. I’m dealing with serious depression. I’m not okay right now, I’m struggling.’ He scoffed at me. I replied, ‘I wish it was THAT easy.'”
