Plate techtonics

I’m on shaky ground this week, dizzy and disoriented. I can’t find a linear thread here so I toss out all these puzzle pieces hoping to make a coherent picture in the end.

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Last week I jealously listened to a couple of parents on a panel share their memories of receiving their children’s diagnosis of a particular genetic syndrome before or at birth. Their stories triggered memories of my own years of confusion and worry when my child with medical, cognitive and developmental special needs had no diagnosis or prognosis, only assurances to wait and see. Nothing like their experience of having rock solid information, a roadmap, a sense of place even.

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Chronic limbo left me unmoored during those years. I had two mental tapes, the public one which chanted “he’s fine, he’s doing great, wait and see, he’ll catch up” in unison with the therapists and teachers around me, and the private one, darkly creative, the one that read or heard about the worst cases of horrible care and outcomes for adults with disabilities and inserted my gentle, vulnerable son’s image into each one.

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In the special needs parenting world, talk often turns to the need for acceptance. Accepting our children, accepting our challenges, accepting reality on a very basic level to simply exist helps us meet it with wisdom and discernment instead of running away from it in fear or kicking it away in anger. Without a clear sense of what was actually going on, acceptance was elusive for me. Acceptance and proper diagnosis, at least in my experience, were connected, and one couldn’t come without the other.

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A few years ago my son was given a label, a diagnosis based on the appearance of his symptoms. The mothers on last week’s panel talked about how they both remembered the exact moment they receive their child’s diagnoses–where they were, what they smelled, what song was playing on the radio when the call came in or the information was revealed.  Our diagnosis was never like that. It just evolved over time based on new symptoms as they appeared, a name of a syndrome followed by a question mark which faded over time until it was nearly invisible.  It wasn’t a perfect match, but simply getting a label enabled me to get unstuck and move toward acceptance and advocacy. With the diagnosis came a whole new tribe of folks to talk to, new access to research, to resources. It felt good to stand on ground that wasn’t exactly solid, but swayed just gently and rhythmically enough to make it look like I was dancing.

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A few moments spent on the website of a genetic syndrome support group this week brings me face-to-face with photos of a boy who could be my son’s identical twin. The same eyes, the same jaw, the same nose, even the same expression. Another click of the mouse and there’s another one. Brothers from another mother. With a deep sense of knowing, like cylinders in a lock clicking into place, I see my child in the list of symptoms where only a year ago I could see no strong resemblance. It’s hard to explain how. New symptoms have appeared, new behaviors have been identified. But this is not our genetic syndrome, not our diagnosis. A different one, a rarer one, with a whole new set of symptoms, a whole new tribe, a whole new language, a whole different place altogether.

And the ground begins to shake yet again.