Why Time Away from Stress Matters
On our last day of school, we entered the building where I am a teacher, and our children are middle school students. Our son was lamenting that he wasn’t growing as tall as he would like. “Mom, do you think one day I’ll be 6’2” like Dad?”
Before I had the chance to respond, our daughter commented, “Carver, Dad is really only like 4’6”, and we all started giggling. In his seated wheelchair position, he is in fact not very tall. How she came up with the 4’6” height is beyond me, except that it was a big deal when she finally surpassed him and loved how she was “taller” than her dad. The laughter felt good given the stress of the morning at home.
Over the weekend, I thought I was doing a good deed by purchasing a new toilet seat for Geoff’s adaptive bathroom commode. I installed it myself on Fathers’ Day, not as a Fathers’ Day gift, but because he had needed a new seat for some time, and they happened to be “on sale.” This morning, instead of commenting, “Oh thanks, honey, for the new seat,” he noted how cheap the seat felt. I explained how it was on sale, while I was simultaneously rushing to get us all out of the house and to school on time. Well, only a few minutes later, the poor guy almost fell through his commode when the new toilet seat collapsed. Apparently, he was right. Oops.
I had not yet thrown the old one away at the dump, so I went out to the garage, retrieved it and reinstalled Geoff's commode, while cursing to myself. We were not going to make it to school on time, but this was one of those situations where Geoff needed the toilet seat and needed it more quickly than we needed to get to school on time. Life. It goes that way some days. Many times, I wonder how other families with both spinal cord injuries and children get through stressful moments. I hope they find the time to laugh a lot. Maybe they are just more accepting of being late. But we get up at 4 or 5 am seven days a week between my work and his. To say we cannot wait for summer vacation (where we both still work, but not every day and not so early) is an understatement.
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Summers must potentially feel so long if you are stuck inside or always watching from the sidelines, especially feeling the impact of diverse mobility with children. We are so lucky that our children are growing up mostly outdoors, participating in a variety of recreation activities alongside us. However, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a lot of work loading and unloading cars and people and equipment.
Recently, a friend told me, all joking aside, that my bike rack is obnoxious. And he wasn’t wrong. It’s gigantic, but it allows me to get three or four full size mountain bikes on the back. It is ridiculously heavy to lift and down every time I need to get into the back of my car whether it’s for groceries, for kid crap, or for wheelchairs if we are traveling somewhere as a family. This bike rack facilitates transportation because our family cannot afford a large van or giant pickup truck. Geoff has an equally sized bike rack on his car for his bike alone. We are lucky indeed.
I guess the alternative is that we stay home and look out the windows and hang out on our porch. But, then we would wonder how much adventure we would be missing in the world.