The Biggest Question I've Ever Asked Myself

Because my body decided to be weird, I had reason to take a pregnancy test recently. I'm not, so just stop that already. I never thought I was, really, but nine weeks is a very long time with no unwelcome visitor, and being of childbearing age what else was I to think? Things have become normal again, which either means that the holiday stress was way more than I figured it for, or I'm older than I realized.

But all that gave me reason to think about things that I'd never had reason to think about before. Things like having another baby, and how it would impact our lives, and what Micah would think of a younger sibling, and where on earth we'd put another kid, and how we'd feed it. (You read that with rising panic, right? Because that's how the thoughts came tumbling out of my head.)

And then a thought whispered itself into the chaos, arresting all panic with it's weight. What if we had another child with a disability?

When Micah was born, the shock of his diagnosis rocked our world. I call it the Snow Globe Effect. Our lives were turned upside down, shaken, and set upright again, and we were expected to pretend that nothing was amiss, although pieces of what was previously our normal life were falling around our feet.

In the past six years we have found a new normal for our family. It looks more like a spontaneous and random bowing to fate, but we've adjusted. And we're loving our new life, with Micah at the center. If you would have told me, six years ago, that one of our children would call the shots on a daily basis in both big things and small, I would have scoffed. We're the parents; our children don't rule us. Yet, here we are, following Micah to therapies and specialists and meetings. We sit through IEPs and have become experts at navigating the hospital's surgical wing, and we're still using diapers and sippy cups even though our youngest is closer 7 than 6.

Life will never be normal again. I've never wondered what it would be like if it were, because that wouldn't change things. I simply go on, taking one day at a time, and wondering, instead, what may be rather than what could have been.

So when my head asked the well-founded question, no doubt motivated from that fear of what might be, "what would you do if you had another child with a disability?" my heart was quick to answer, "love it." From the depths of my being, peace overwhelmed me. I would welcome the possibility of another someone to disrupt our lives. We would find a new normal. Again.

The only thought that still lingers is one that baffles me. Why was I taken aback by my complete acceptance? Isn't that how it's supposed to work?