Approaching day 365

In a few weeks Noah will reach his FIRST birthday.  Crazy that time has flown by so fast and yet stood still in so many other ways.  I was forewarned that the first few birthdays are hard on "special needs" parents but like all things you have to experience it yourself before you can really understand what everyone tells you. 

The first birthday marks 365 days that our sweet Noah has been a apart of our family.  It marks the billion upon billion of kisses we have given his adorable face. It fills our scrapbooks with pictures and memories marking every single holiday and event for the year.  It marks the first celebration we get to throw for our first born son and share with all of our family and friends just how remarkable Noah has grown to be.  This is what first birthdays are all about.  This is what Jeremy and I remind ourselves all the time.  This is what I have personally been forcing myself to focus on more than what I was told I would feel.....but sometimes the grey moments still creep in and I can't help but feel the moments of melancholy that make my eyes glisten and I find myself catching short breathes and bits of sorrow. 

Even Mother Theresa herself had moments of jealousy and sorrow.  I am only human and I have been given the gift of feeling every kind of emotion there is to have...and I do...all the time...good and bad. For the most part I have been able to really hold tight to all things positive and uplifting.  I have found the ability to see the good in all things bad or uncomfortable.  I have learned a great deal of patience and I think I have grown really strong on the inside.  I have this new idea of what truly makes someone a superhero as I have now met many throughout this year.  One smile or giggle from Noah can completely erase an entire weeks worth of struggle and despair and to me that makes him my own personal superhero.  I have learned how to still have a typical day after a night of zero sleep and how to leave the emergency room and still get my grocery shopping done the same day.  I have learned how to accept help and even ask for help which is one of the hardest things I have ever learned to do.  I found out that I have what people refer to as Pride and have had to push that pride aside to accept financial help for our son. I have found out that me being an open book as gotten Noah more services and aid than shutting our lives inside a safe little bubble.  However, I have also found out that I can feel the darkest deepest saddest feelings and emotions as well. These I hate!  I can't control what my mind wonders to as I lay there and try to fall asleep some nights.  Worry, anxiety, stress, confusion, anger, gut wrenching despair just to name a few.

As his first birthday approaches I have been struggling with a few things.  First being the fact that I have not found my inner Martha Stewart and gone crazy over making handmade invitations and ordering decorations like I have always done in the past with any other celebration.  I want to and I come up with some good ideas but when it comes down to actually doing it I just fall short.  This was bothering me so bad because I knew something was wrong for me to be acting like this.  I knew it was more than just being tired.  Then one really bad day at work happened and I sat there at my desk being blinded by thousands of lines of data on a spreadsheet when it hit me.  I am sad.  The reason I couldn't seem to pull myself together for Noah's birthday was because I was dreading it.  I didn't want to be reminded that a full year has passed and he is still unable to do so many things we thought he could do by now.  I didn't want to cry over a birthday cake I knew he couldn't eat nor would he be able to smash and get messy in like any other 1 year old.  I didn't want to think about shopping or even looking at toys that at his age are all pretty much developmental in some way and beyond his capabilities.  They would just sit in a box not being played with because frankly Noah can't play yet with toys.  Then in that utterly dark moment I continued to fall deeper and deeper into the dark hole of gloom. 

It is so easy to fall in these moments and takes literally seconds before you fall so far down that you end up with a bump or break or bruised ego in my case.  Then, you just sit there in the bottom of this stupid hole getting mad at yourself for falling in the first place and letting yourself get to that point of sadness. It is hard to look up.  It is hard to try to come up with the strength or courage or even desire sometimes to want to get out of this hole.  Sometimes I find that I have to just sit there for awhile and think or speak or share all my negative thoughts swimming in my head to just plain get them out of my head so that I don't feel so weighed down and can finally start to stand up again.

This is exactly what happened to me this past month leading up to Noah's birthday.  I fell.  I got sad.  I got mad.  I then shared.  I talked.  I got the thoughts out of my head.  Then I looked up and saw the light of day again.  It is amazing how I find myself feeling after I have shared my worries.  It is like saying things out loud somehow is like proofreading my own feelings and emotions.  It shows me all the areas that need to be scratched out or rephrased or put more emphasis on and in the end I have a really good grasp on what I am truly feeling and not just getting carried away with. 

It is not day 365...it is Noah's birthday!  It is not the day to access all that has not happened but rather how much he has overcome and accomplished.  With a whip cream pie, those who love and adore him, and two completely enamored parents we are taking Noah's birthday and celebrating his adorable toothy smile, his chunky thighs, his award winning laugh attacks, and all the wonderful memories our internal cameras have captured and stored in our memories forever. November 11th will start scrapbook #2 and I am so excited to see what kinds of memories get stuck to its pages.