Today Is Not Yesterday

I was recently in Colorado and had a chance to catch up with friends that I have known for more than ten years. We knew each other before I was married and before any of us had children. They’re also one of the few people who knew us before epilepsy.

We reminisced about the days when our lives were simpler and had much less responsibility. Adulting is hard. The weight of trying to focus on a career but still spend time with the kids, friends, and each other gets to be too much. We’re all exhausted and come home and want to do nothing but go to bed early.

Ten years ago, we thought it would all be possible. Ten years ago, we thought nothing would change. Now, we’re tired and depressed because we couldn’t maintain our lives from the past. So it made sense that we would be nostalgic for the time before we felt like we were failing.

But we’re not failing. As much as we thought we could, we weren’t supposed to keep things the same. We couldn’t just sprinkle on new stuff like kids or a more senior job. Our lives evolve and become something else. Today is not yesterday. It’s something new.

Instead of trying to fit my new life into the old one, I’ve tried to figure out what my life should look like now. Instead of focusing on what was important to me then, I’m trying to focus on what is important to me now and build my life around that.

But it’s hard to let go of the past, especially when there are days when the present seems impossible. Every seizure, every outburst, every time my son can’t remember what just happened…I just want to hop into a time machine and go back to before any of this happened.

I think that is what my brain is doing every time it compares today to yesterday. It’s trying to bring me back to the past. But it’s wasting energy. It’s swimming against the current instead of letting the current carry me forward. Worse, the past that it is trying to bring me back to isn’t real…it’s a distorted version made better by years of distance.

It’s not always easy to focus on the present. The present is hard. The present is real. But instead of using my energy to try to make my life what it was, I should be using it to make my life the best that it can be now. Because the present is where my life is. The present is where my family is. The present is where I am needed. The present is where I am supposed to be.

Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure. ~R.A. Salvatore

I Don’t Have The Answers

Every day, I wake up, head to the computer, and write about my life as the father of an amazing child who has epilepsy. I’ve been doing it for more than three years. But I don’t feel like I have any more answers now than I did when I started.

When I write, it’s from the perspective of a father trying to work out his thoughts and emotions on the page. I am not an expert. Wisdom comes from hindsight but we’re still in the thick of it. And every day I realize more and more of how much I don’t know.

I don’t know how to minimize his pharmaceutical side effects. I don’t know how long he’ll be on the ketogenic diet. I don’t know whether there is something out there we haven’t tried. I don’t know what new medicine or technology is on the horizon that will help. I don’t know how to prepare him for the world with epilepsy. I don’t know what to do to get my son to stop seizing. I don’t know if he ever will.

An expert would have answers. An expert would know what to do. An expert would speak from the perspective of someone who has been through it. They know how the story ends or how the tension resolves. I don’t have any of those things.

But here is what I do know. I know that I love my son more than anything. I know my wife and I are doing everything we can to keep him whole and to give him the best life that we can. I know that I need to be the best man and father for him. I know we need to take each moment as it comes and make the best choice we can with the information that we have. I know we have this moment right now, and I know that nothing else is guaranteed.

Planning For The Short Term

“Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans” ~Allen Saunders

At the end of the school year, we finally received an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for my son. An IEP defines individualized educational goals for children determined to have a disability and any accommodations that need to be made to help achieve those goals. Before the summer break, we sat with our lawyer across the table from the school district to talk about the specific details of my son’s goals and accommodations for the third grade.

Even though the start of the school year was only two months away, we knew that whatever we put into the plan was likely to change before the first day of third grade. We knew because it always does. We’ve tried different schedules and approaches before we had the IEP. They might work for a few weeks until we change a medication or until his fatigue builds up so much that he can’t function and we need to adjust.

The same goes for other aspects of his life. The constant variance of his seizure burden and his mental and physical stamina means that we can rarely look too far into the future. Sometimes, we plan for a week or a few weeks in advance. We might plan a vacation a few months away because we know that, wherever we are, we can make it work for a short period of time. But we’ve learned that putting things in the calendar is more of a suggestion or a placeholder than it is a commitment.

Most of our plans are short-term plans. We look ahead at the next day or the next week and try to plan our lives. My son’s health is unpredictable. His physical health. His mental state. It constantly changes. The decisions we make any given day, like skipping a nap, can have consequences that change any plans that we’ve had. Extra seizures one morning. An accumulation of exhaustion that we didn’t see building up. We’re adapting more than we’re predicting by adjusting our plan moment to moment based on where he is physically and mentally.

We rarely look beyond that because we have no idea what the future has in store for my son. We still contribute to an education savings account for my son because I don’t want to consider the possibility that he won’t need it. We’ve put off estate and custody discussions because these conversations are impossible and because planning that far out seems futile. Things change day-to-day and month to month so planning for years away seems impossible.

“Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” The Allen Saunders quote is often attributed to John Lennon because he popularized it in Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy).

Out on the ocean sailing away
I can hardly wait
To see you come of age
But I guess we’ll both just have to be patient
‘Cause it’s a long way to go
A hard row to hoe
Yes, it’s a long way to go
But in the meantime
Before you cross the street
Take my hand
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans

I know the future is going to come whether we want it to or not and whether we know what it has in store for us or not. Maybe I’m trying to give him the best life I can in the present. Maybe we’re just trying to focus on living our lives and taking each unpredictable day as it comes. Maybe I focus on the short-term because I’m too afraid to think about the long-term and what that the doctors think might be in store for him.

We have a long way to go, and it’s a hard row to hoe. But in the meantime, before you cross the street, take my hand.