This February I’m still on a “Self-Care for the Caregiver” kick. The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation tells me that my life experiences as a caregiver might offer a profound opportunity to share with others - that my words may “resonate” with others facing daily living challenges as people, parents perhaps, in this one day at a time kind of universe. But sometimes, we don’t realize how far we’ve come until we look back. So, take a moment to take a look back at your own worlds, maybe back to when you were first challenged by mobility - or when your life collided with mobility challenges for another human.
Think about those early days for your family. When my husband Geoff was first paralyzed back in 1995 (hard to believe almost 30 years ago now), he was not part of my life. When we started a family, he had already been tackling mobility challenges for over a decade. When I see this photo of our little family on the ski slope at Loon Mountain, my first thoughts are: So cute, the kids, their tiny skis, and their stuffed animals. In this photo our daughter is not quite 2, and our son is 3. In fact, they are both still in diapers.
However, after those first few initial thoughts at the memory, my mind immediately slips into: Oh my word - there was so much to carry. The diaper bag, the little skis, the little helmets, the little mittens. How did we ever make it from the house to the car to the mountain carrying all those little things including their little bodies? Then there was the walk from the parking lot to the snow. For our family, we strapped our toddlers into a double Bob stroller until they could release themselves. It must have taken hours, and with the crying, it was probably terrible most of the time (the kids, I mean, but I’m sure I cried too at times). But here’s the thing, much like childbirth, I remember less about the pain of the memory and more about the joy in the moment of us all on snow at the same time, marking the memory with this milestone photo.