Father's Day and Other Unpleasant Reminders

Today is father's day. This day is not as hard for me as Mother's Day, because I am selfish because I am married to a man who doesn't put much significance on the day. He grew up without his dad, though was very fortunate to have a wonderful grandfather who he lived with and, at age 9, a step-dad joined his life. Both were good role models and love him very much, but as he told me one day, and I have never forgotten, they could never replace having his own father. 

So he we are, a fatherless and childless father on Father's Day. What do I say? On this past mother's Day, when Take Two was just 6 weeks along, hub said "I don't want to curse anything, but I hope today is a good day and I love you". I feel the same way.

Hopefully, this is the last childless father's day for him.

In other news, I was perusing the blogs today and read "Single Dad/ Disabled Daughter" SD is one of my favorite bloggers. I'm not sure if I've mentioned him before, but he is the father of a severely disabled, beautiful daughter. Truly, occasionally he will share a picture of the two of them, and they are so beautiful together, I cry every time. His was a blog I found when in limbo between screening odds and termination, when I was making and then confirming my decision to terminate. His is an honest, heartbreaking account of raising a severely disabled child. She is non-verbal and non-mobile, she needs constant care and nearly constant advocation on her behalf. He loves her, deeply and truly.

Sometimes, reading his blog and those like his, I feel like a voyeur. I call it "lifting the veil", it's a giant game of what-if. What-if I had chosen differently, what-if Blue Sunday had lived. There are no answers, there is no going back, however, I imagine Blue Sunday would have been far more like SD's Pearlsky than the bloggers I read whose kids have DS or hydrocephalus.

This is all a round-about way to say that SD wrote a post for the "What to Expect" website. The post is here, and you really should read it,  he talks about his daughter and his son, both disabled, he talks about the horror of being told your child won't survive, he talks about the life lessons his children have taught him. He talks about his guilt. In these ways, he gets at some of the core commonalities of the end of expecting a "normal" child and stepping into the world of something else. He talks about the lifting of the veil through his own experiences.

Though it is painful to read about experiences of those who have had a healthy pregnancy and/ or child taken from them, I think it is vital to get our experiences out there. There are so many of us who experience something that used to be almost unspeakable.