Photo by Arthur Brognoli from Pexels
If a picture is worth a thousand words, here ⬆️ is my picture for the last few weeks. SMH.
A few weeks ago, I was headed home to switch off parental duty stations with my husband when I was involved in an accident, resulting in my car being totaled. I know, when it rains it pours. I also feel the need to clarify that I was not the at-fault driver here, I’m just saying.
Then we got sick...like the kind of sick you only get once every few years but when you do you wished you half-assed it more frequently than visiting death's doorstep once every few years. (This might be slightly overdramatized, but given how long it has been since we've been sick and everything else going on it really felt like it! Or at least like the Neverending Story.)
So, with all of that, I believe I hit my threshold for extreme situational tolerance. As a result, I found myself without the words I needed, and/or the desire to express what was going on. I just wanted to sleep, binge-watch Netflix, and tell someone to wake me when it was all over. I didn't want to deal anymore, let alone talk about it; and really, who wants to be the perpetual whiner? So I opted to stay silent and just cope moment by moment with my fattening foods, bed, and sad indie films nobody ever wants to watch with me but I'm kinda glad because I had a good ugly-cry fest.
And once again, our tribe came to the rescue, like always.
We had friends loaning is their cars, others bringing meals, more still calling or writing to check-in, others working so hard to bring awareness to our Go Fund Me page, and adopted family members who drove me to SLC and back so I could spend the weekend with my husband and Griffin in the midst of dealing with the car debacle. We had an army of people which we have had from the get-go, and which has only gotten bigger as this journey has continued, in our corner, making sure our mess was their mess too.
Writing that last sentence reminds me of a song that just hits me in the feels right now and is so apt in so many ways:
"Hold on my darling
This mess was yours, now your mess is mine "
- Lyrics from "Mess Is Mine" by Vance Joy
Go listen to it. And thank you Vance Joy for giving me the words (I hope you don’t mind!?)
But I digress.
So we have this amazing and huge tribe which we are so incredibly grateful for, and I pondered this a lot this week as Primary Children's opened up their visitor policy from the Covid restrictions. You can now have any two people at the bedside so long as they are 12 and up! It’s pretty exciting and you can feel it in the energy of the place.
Where the halls were so quiet and empty compared to what you would think of a Children's Hospital being, there are people everywhere now. Families and friends who have not seen their beloved kiddos in who knows how long were communing in the cafeterias and waiting spaces as they rotated in and out by twos. There were smiles, laughter, hugs, and the good kind of tears everywhere you looked. There's hope filling the hospital air and the parking lot is filled almost full even late into the night. Everything is better and lighter, because having your tribe around you when you're in a crisis is invaluable.
Like the last few weeks for me, when you can't keep your boat afloat on your own, your people are the ones that throw a life raft for you and tether you to theirs. We parents of the exceptional kiddos of the world are not superheroes or superhuman; we didn't come with some secretly stashed away superpowers to endure the unendurable. We're just surviving it because there is no other choice. We rise to the occasion because how do you not when you watch your child fight so fearlessly and without complaint, day in and day out? And we make it through because of you, our tribe, and your ginormous ships of love and hope that tug us along and keep us going.
So to our tribe, and I mean ALL of you: our family, our friends, our neighbors, our acquaintances, our medical team, the people who have found and followed Griffin's story on IG or read this blog and reached out, our support groups - thank you from the bottom of our hearts! Oh, how I wish that felt like a big enough word!!! Each one of you is so wonderful and we could not ask for better people to surround, support, and love on us the way you all do!
We don't get to choose a lot in this life, and there's a whole lot we wouldn't have chosen for this part of our journey; but we do get to choose our tribe - I like our choices.
Sending you all, all the love, appreciation, and gratitude <3
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