Ok, so sometimes I fail, and probably a little more than sometimes. But this past weekend, while camping with my youngest daughter’s first-grade class, I was smacked in the face a few times, once literally, with the level of denial I have apparently been in. And maybe it’s not so much denial of where Freya is with the way her syndrome manifests, but more in denial of how much support I need to provide her in these kinds of settings.
I wanted to be a typical parent this weekend; to relax and be social and get to know the other parents without stress or explanations or disruptions or any kind of sympathetic aw’s and oh’s. I tried to make it so, and failed Freya in the process.
We don’t solve our problems by denying them, we don’t learn to handle our situations by muting our minds, and we don’t get to be the typical family at the camp-out simply because we want it to be so.