On the Knife's Edge

Our lives with Naomi are like balancing on a knife's edge.  Lean too far one way and you fall into the abyss of grief and despair, lean too far the other and you forget how precious each and every moment is and get bogged down in the nonsense of day to day life.   Instead, we try to balance on that sharp edge, an edge that so often hurts and cuts, trying not to let ourselves think too much about the broken dreams and difficult experiences of the past and definitely trying to not dwell too much on the horrors that are most assuredly coming.  The future, for us, is a scary thing.  Like every other parent, when Naomi was born we began eagerly anticipating the future, her first smile, crawling, walking, talking.  We even started her college fund.  So much of the joy of life is in the anticipation of things.  Joyful anticipation is one of the sweetest feelings.  Joyful anticipation is a feeling we have had to abandon.  If we let ourselves drift towards thoughts of the future, we anticipate Naomi losing the few milestones she has gained and a lot of our anticipation with Naomi is anticipatory grieving, which definitely is in the abyss of grief and despair.  So we have tried to give up thinking about the future.   We have tried to give up reminiscing about the past.  We try to stay rigidly focused on the present, but ever aware of how precious the present is.  For our family, there can only be today.  We're okay if we stay in today.  If we don't, well, you'll probably read about that here too.