EVERY NOW AND THEN

Every now and then I sit with my wife at the dinner table and I take a deep breath, as deep as my wife Ellen's. We talked about a lot of things, but the prevalent conversation always returns to the same subject, our children and life experiences.

It seems that we did not live the perfect life, that we had to struggle to make our children happy. There was no perfection when we took our daughter with developmental disabilities to public places. People would stare at us, look with disdain at my daughter and their children learned well from their parents, looking at my child like she was an unwanted freak.

We were branded by events such as a child of ours died. That meant that we were poison, we were branded, that we had a stigma, a dead child and one we mourn every day who lives in a group home, you know where the little yellow bus comes for.

We have dealt with depressions, death, and disabilities, but each of us never held all the cards, no, we shared them. My wife held all the emotional cards, the love and understanding of our little girl and I held all the decision cards, what I needed to do and where I would go with this.

But in the end, if you look at life as a journey, one of triumph and disappointment, then we had the perfect situation, we had each other.