K8 the GR8

There’s a constant internal nagging stuck on loop in my head.  Every mother feels it in her own way, each worries needlessly if they’re caring enough, providing a good enough start for their kids, knowing deep down that to hug and to keep safe is all that really matters.

With Laughingboy, this feeling has more pronounced lows and highs.  The kid is six years old and completely dependant, meaning that he can’t ward off boredom by kicking a football against a wall, twiddling on a transformer, or even holding a blinking toy.  He just lies there, stuck in the position he was last left in, sometimes for hours on end.

I feel pangs for him when I’m pooching on the net, or fighting virtual baddies on the xbox - I think of how I could be using this time to sit with him and talk or read with him… anything, just to have him aware that I love him and haven’t forgotten him.  It’s stupid, I mean if I didn’t rest sometimes on the long path of motherhood, I’d go crazy, and I know that.

It’s just that when I see him stare into space as he usually does when there’s nothing visual to focus on, I wonder… if he doesn’t know frenzied exercise, doesn’t it stand to reason that he doesn’t know boredom?  I pray that my imagination is so limited that I have no idea of the wonderful stuff spinning through his mind as the hours crawl by, for it’s more than I could stand to think he lives his whole life in prepetual emptiness.

This would have been the case a hundred years ago.  Laughingboy would have been forced into a home or locked in a basement with no-one to hear his giggles, nothing to do all day but stare.

This isn’t a hundred years ago, though, it’s today.  The day of respite, the day of St. Catherine’s.  St. Catherines school, and others like her, are where you want to go if you ever want to meet an angel.

St. Catherine’s fills Laughingboy’s school days with activity; stuff like physiotherapy, swimming and singing.  If you thought Barney was on drugs, these people would Blow. Your. Mind.

This is an era where bad news rules the media.  If you look closely, though, you’ll find that bad news is just the scum on the surface of life’s pond.  There are amazing fish underneath who will bravely land a seized-up Boeing 777 against all odds and save all the lives on board, and fish who will ignore someone’s disabilities and squeeze their untapped happiness out with only the purest of motivations.

I got this photo sent home in Laughingboy’s schoolbag yesterday:

It soothes the crazy like a warm fleece blanket.