Melt Downs

Today at the Y, I was combing the sidelines for families to sit and watch practice with. It is my privilege to be responsibility to oversee our youth sport programs, where one of my favorite jobs is to join moms, dads, brothers, sisters, and the occasional grandparent to create a stronger community. Today, I stood by the side of a mom who was watching her son with amazement in the midst of her exhaustion.

I have the tallest glass of respect for parents and guardians! They have the most important job of all. The heaviness on this mom’s face was visible but outmatched by her beaming sense of pride. Her son was playing baseball! As I got to talk more with her, she shared that it had been an incredibly stressful day with her son’s severe medical condition. Bringing her hands to her face, she said that this moment was worth it all: seeing him play sports after the past two years of scary unknowns in the medical world made her speechless.

This made me melt. Suddenly, I wasn’t talking to a mom in our program; I was sharing a moment in history with my own mom. My mom who, after six years of medical trauma in our family, was finally able to watch me play on my field: the netball court. Many of the same sentiments poured out over the next five minutes were this Y mom’s words but echoed a very different time of my life.

She spilled the frustration of not knowing answers to the pain her son was feeling for months on end. Her sense of fatigue was only symptomatic of the dedication to her son’s care she fervently expressed. She was excited to share that they finally found a doctor who seemed to be getting her son’s condition under control and that her joy in watching her son doing the little things he couldn’t before, like carry a cup across the room, was overwhelming.

I remember when my mom wept with joy when I walked out of the van on a stop for popsicles on our way home from the Cleveland Clinic. It was just days after my surgery that made it possible for me to walk again. I took the grocery cart, leaning on it, and started to walk into the store. Several steps behind, my mom had paused. Taking in the moment, she was reduced to tears in disbelief that I was actually able to push the cart.

This mom on the sidelines was like my mom: going six hundred directions at once emotionally and physically under the circumstances. What my sideline mom didn’t know was that I stood next to her as an example that you could come out after years of chaos and crisis both alive and well.

Rarely do I share my story (especially outside of a personal setting), but this time of professionalism was quickly intertwined with something truly personal. I told her that I knew all too well what her family was experiencing because I am a lot like her son. For five teenage years, I lived a medically driven life in a wheelchair with RSD/CRPS and that it was incredibly difficult for our family. Despite that, today I am doing well and live life to the fullest.

Her jaw dropped and she wrapped her arms around me in a hug with one of the most excited, “Congratulations!” I’ve ever heard. In that moment, she wasn’t hugging me. She was holding on to the real hope that her son would make a comeback greater than she ever imagined. When I was speaking to her, the words didn’t speak to the miles I had traveled to get to where I am today, they spoke to the wish she holds for her son: that years or months from now, he will have a more normal life.

I am blessed to have been able to give a light of hope for this mom today. It makes me incredibly grateful for the hopefulness that others interjected in our family’s story years ago when we needed it most.