At Maximum Capacity

Life is hard.  We all know that.  No one gets through it without difficulty and trouble.  It's part of living in a fallen world.  It takes strength and endurance to make it through with your peace, dignity and sense of self intact.  When you have a profoundly disabled child with a devastating disease and enormous, endless needs, it isn't just doubly harder.   It is exponentially harder.  Even in a perfect day where everything goes well and smoothly, we are operating at maximum capacity.  There is no room for error.  There are no more valves we can open to ease the pressure in the boiler of our lives.   It takes incredible fortitude and determination to get out of bed each morning, greet the sun, and try to move forward.  And when something goes wrong?  When something fails to go smoothly?  It's too much.  We were already at maximum capacity.   And so we explode, the shrapnel of our pain and struggle flying outward indiscriminately, leaving destruction and chaos in its wake.  And after the explosion there is no choice but to bind the wounds, patch the damage and continue moving relentlessly forward toward a future we care not think about, because the sun keeps rising and setting, whether we want it to or not.