Progressing to exposure

I watch a ladybug lazily climbing towards the flowers. I don't know if this is her top pace or if the sun has made her drowsy. She inches along, bit by bit. This is me, I think. Inching along. Barely making progress. Feeling the "two steps forward, one step back" process is going too slowly.

Reprocessing is the next step in my therapy journey. This technique holds onto the hope that, if you talk about it enough, a memory loses it's power over your present and future. Before I began this part of therapy, I was very nervous about it. I held it at arms length, even thinking about refusing to participate at all. I also noted that I was self-sabotaging the very process that offered me the best chance at recovery.

Now it's started, and the debate is over. Two weeks of it brings a reduction in flashbacks and a return to somewhat normalcy. I wake up today, knowing it is therapy day, and there's that nervous excitement brewing in my belly. My heart speeds up in anticipation. My palms are cool and clammy. There is something about knowing a little surge of relief is coming. It cracks open the outer shell and tentatively tilts the tender to the sun. 

The best of therapies

She has a seizure about once a month, while she's falling asleep. Many days she loses control of her bowel or bladder, still, at almost five. She has her raspy Bostonian lisp that reminds everyone of Fran Drescher, but through speech therapy, is relearning how to use her tongue to swallow and speak more clearly.

She's a quirky one, with hilarious postures, faces, and ways of pairing words that often has our whole family in giggles. She's stick straight stiff-limbed and melts only after a half hour of rhythmic rocking and sucking at bedtime. Even then, she sleeps stiff, and I have to use force to bend her joints when I carry her back to her bed from ours in the dark of the night.

Her eyes don't always track together, and she is a klutzy one, running into things frequently and forever bonking her head and nose on things, with a torrent of tears to follow.

But the best of therapies for my child-forever-changed are the simple things in life. Riding horseback with the York girls. Jumping on her trampoline. Going swimming. Conversing over books with Mama.

I wonder if it is different for any other child? We all have our quirks, our weaknesses and strengths. I am in therapy myself, and there I learn about fear and anxiety and how it steals from the moment you're in and borrows trouble from tomorrow.

So I try to let her do what she can, try to protect her, but allow her freedom. I try not to imagine a 20-year-old who sleeps in a diaper and poops in her pants. I try to believe that she will be fully functional as an adult, and just focus on the moment. Watching her navigate the barn stairs in her own fashion. Smiling huge over the horses, and giving her deep, tenor belly laugh so many hundreds of times each day.

Please, Lord, keep healing. And keep us all focused on the ABILITY in disability. The CAN in can't. The many prayers answered instead of the prayers still being prayed.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work. Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines. (from I Corinthians 12)