earlybird

Good morning! More like good middle of the night! I love getting up early-like 4 am early. It’s my quiet time, and my productive time. I haven’t gotten up this early in months. It’s not even 5 and I’ve already gotten some work done for school, have some healthy baked oatmeal in the oven, and I am writing this. I started getting up this early out of necessity a few years ago. It was when I didn’t have nursing and I was pregnant with John. I had to get up to get myself up and ready for the day before I could get Ian up to do all of his treatments, meds, and hygiene. And I had to finish that before I got Emmy up for school and got us all out of the house by 6:45. And eventually, I realized I liked it-that I was really productive at that time of day. (This is bizarre because I didn’t even go to bed before 4 half the time when I was young).

It just goes to show you how much change we can go through in our lives. I doubt that one person who knew me when I stayed up until 6 am would picture me baking and doing work before the sun even comes up. We aren’t destined to be a certain way forever. If that were the case, I would probably be dead by now. Literally. But what is it that motivates change? Being a party girl was fun, I loved all the nonsense adventures I used to get in, so why would I stop? Well, obviously, I had kids, but that isn’t actually going to change things if you don’t want. Plenty of people don’t change when they have kids. But, you don’t change when you are happy. You don’t change when things are going your way. You don’t change because someone wants you to. You will only change when you are uncomfortable, in an unbearable amount of pain, or forced to adapt (which is still a choice). And I have been in all of these situations in the past few years.

But, my turning point really happened after Ian got hurt. I don’t know if I can explain the upheaval having a child with a traumatic brain injury. Obviously, I spent years working with people with brain injuries and it was my worst nightmare. I always thought that I would be ok and accepting if I had a child that was born with a disability. They would just be my baby, and I would watch them grow and learn just like a typical child, even though it would look a little different. But I knew that watching my child be taken away before my eyes would be something I could not bear witness to. And, it was worse then I thought. You have to grieve a person that is alive every day. You have to look at your beautiful child and relive the trauma every damn day. One day you are living a regular life, and a few weeks later you are in the hospital being monitored to see if you are capable of bringing your own child home. Your child that can’t call you mommy anymore. Everything you knew about life ceases to exist. Everything you knew to be true is a lie. You make the choice to change and adapt, and if you don’t someone is going to die. And honestly, the person that was going to die was me. I was still under the assumption that I could cope the old way-that I didn’t have to change everything now that I had a disabled child. But, the old way wasn’t working anymore. And I didn’t change for Ian, I changed for me. I had to dig deep and figure out who I wanted to be. And I realized I wanted to be the mom up baking and taking care of my kids, not the person closing down the after hours party.

And just a reminder-YOU CAN’T MAKE ANYONE ELSE CHANGE! It’s just not possible unless they want to. Just having a brain injured child wasn’t enough to make me change, I had to want to make that difference in my own life. And getting up early today was significant in reflection of a choice I made to get out of my misery. I can’t stay in the misery of losing Ian forever. I want to-that means I get to be attached to him in some way all day. Doing something other than being miserable almost feels like a betrayal to him-like I’m not being sad enough for him. A weird, self-sabotaging, existence that isn’t working for me anymore.

So today was the day for change again. To at least try to change to get back to a point of normal functioning. I feel like it’s not going to look the way I expect. That it’s still not going to feel good. That it’s still going to be brutal. But, I got up nice and early to try.