The snowdrops came up this weekend. Their reappearance every year brings a shock of hope so unexpected and intense it’s almost violent. It only took a few hours of sunlight on a warm brick wall and there they were.
If you listen to or read pop culture reviews, you’ve probably stumbled upon a conversation about tropes, which are basically plot devices, themes or recurring character types. When disability gets represented in life and culture, plenty of tired tropes surface.
I opened a book last week and a bookmark slipped out onto the floor. It was a freebie from a favorite bookstore from my old life, back when I lived on the other side of the ocean. I loved that bookstore, with its coffee counter and author events and the way it always had exactly the book I needed even when it didn't have the book I wanted.
Every moment offers a new beginning, but there is something special about the collective transition from one calendar year to the next. It is and always has been a struggle for me not to get too caught up in new beginnings like this, to not be spellbound in the illusion that simply resolving to change will bring change, or that most of the mundane changes I desire, will bring lasting happiness.
There’s another aspect of cultural identity I’ve been thinking about lately: its purpose of providing contours to my otherwise diffuse psyche, like personality eyeliner. A lifetime of fourth of July sparklers, yellow school busses and two-for-Tuesday rock blocks has resulted in a very particular person who is me. If I let this container go, will I still be me? Of course I will, but will I really?
In a recent stress dream, I sat in an airport coffee shop knowing I was supposed to board a plane, but with no recollection of when the it was going to take off or from which gate. Despite being surrounded by information counters and departure displays, I just sat and sat, paralyzed and ashamed, with no sense that there was anything I could do.
Despite the fact that my son is considered a "sick kid"—a child with multiple, chronic conditions—he actually hasn't been in the hospital for years. About a month ago, his winter cold turned into pneumonia, and we've been reacquainted with hospital life with a vengeance. Parenting a child in the hospital for the first time in nearly a decade, I can't help but notice how I've changed.
I ran a 10 km road race this weekend, and I finished dead last. And it was great.
There was a time when I would have made jam from wild berries I picked in the woods. That happens rarely these days. I've become a woman who, when asked the question, "Did you make this?" coyly answers "I made it possible."
Two-plus years into life in Sweden and we are tapping into a service that didn't exist for our son, with his complex developmental disabilities, in the US. It's affectionately known in Swedish as kortis, which loosely translates as shorty, and is literally short for korttidsboende (short-term residence).