My six word memoir(s)

My airwaves have been silent lately. Some new professional opportunities have offered me the chance to share my perspective as a special needs parent to such a remarkable degree that I seem to have little time and few words left for blogging.

But an opportunity came up last week to create and share my six-word memoir. Have you seen these? Six words to capture the essence of my truth. Even I have time to find six words. Granted, my truth has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Becoming a parent of a child with complex medical, cognitive and behavioral needs has gotten me access to deeper truths I wasn’t aware of before. Or maybe the truth hasn’t changed, but the vantage point has shifted.

I’ll give you a for instance. On the eve of my son’s birth, after years of struggling to get pregnant, I was convinced that all of our challenges were behind us. My memoir then:

And they lived happily ever after.

Fast forward a few years, after the two cardiac interventions, the MRIs, the g-tube surgery, the hundreds of Early Intervention sessions, the memoir would have looked something like this:

Not quite what I was planning.

Or, if I’m being totally honest, I can say that I didn’t really need all six words. Two would have sufficed:

Why me?

But something has shifted again. Diving into the deep end of the disability world, finding companionship and empowerment, spending time in silence to reflect on what my son, my family and I really need and want, going from having a broken heart to one that was broken open wide to let life in—it deserves a new headline. So here it is:

How did I get so lucky?

It’ll change, I’m sure. What’s yours?