Tag: parenting

I Don’t Have The Answers

Every day, I wake up, head to the computer, and write about my life as the father of an amazing child who has epilepsy. I’ve been doing it for more than three years. But I don’t feel like I have any more answers now than I did when I started.

When I write, it’s from the perspective of a father trying to work out his thoughts and emotions on the page. I am not an expert. Wisdom comes from hindsight but we’re still in the thick of it. And every day I realize more and more of how much I don’t know.

I don’t know how to minimize his pharmaceutical side effects. I don’t know how long he’ll be on the ketogenic diet. I don’t know whether there is something out there we haven’t tried. I don’t know what new medicine or technology is on the horizon that will help. I don’t know how to prepare him for the world with epilepsy. I don’t know what to do to get my son to stop seizing. I don’t know if he ever will.

An expert would have answers. An expert would know what to do. An expert would speak from the perspective of someone who has been through it. They know how the story ends or how the tension resolves. I don’t have any of those things.

But here is what I do know. I know that I love my son more than anything. I know my wife and I are doing everything we can to keep him whole and to give him the best life that we can. I know that I need to be the best man and father for him. I know we need to take each moment as it comes and make the best choice we can with the information that we have. I know we have this moment right now, and I know that nothing else is guaranteed.

Safe And Sound

It was another rough night. My son had a seizure shortly after going to bed and at least three the next morning. Fortunately, he was sleeping in our bed. It’s easier to catch the seizures and take care of him when he is with us.

Lately, he started doing this thing where, after he has a seizure, he’ll sit up and try to climb out of bed. He’s not awake, it’s more of an electrical impulse that triggers the circuits in his brain that signal him to move. We comfort him during the seizure and then perform early morning Aikido and redirect his impulse to move in the direction of his pillow. Within a few seconds, he is back asleep.

I went through the process for two of his seizures that morning. Comfort, Aikido, sleep. After the last one, I laid in bed with my eyes open and stared at the ceiling. My mind drifted to the question that I still can’t face.

What would happen if we weren’t there? Who would be there to comfort him? Who would be there to keep him safe?

The idea of him doing this alone seems impossible. The idea of him never being able to be on his own is heartbreaking. The thought that I will someday not be here to take care of him, to keep him safe, and to comfort him is what keeps me awake.

The early morning mind is cruel. It is also calculating. It takes advantage of my incoherence to pose unanswerable questions when my defenses are down. It plants unanswerable questions and then sits back to watch the show.

The two solutions I usually come up with are curing epilepsy or becoming immortal. One is just as likely as the next but neither is likely be to solved in my lifetime. And so I am left with the fear of the future. Not for my sake, but for his. Because I was supposed to be the one that took care of him, that showed him how to be a good man and sent him into the world to make his own way.

But I don’t know how to do that when I watch his body seize over and over. The more seizures he has, the more impossible it seems that he’ll be able to make his own way. I’m fighting back the inevitable reality that no matter what I do, I may fail.

I hope I’m wrong.

But even if I’m not, I’ll never stop fighting.

Questions Without Answers

Like many fathers, when my son was born, I had a list of things that I wanted to teach him. I wanted to be the sage, the guru that imparted to him wisdom drawn from my life experiences. I looked forward to the opportunity of leaving him feeling like his old man was a fountain of knowledge for all things. I longed for the bond that the transfer of knowledge would create between us.

How do I tie my shoes?

How do I throw a ball?

How do I tell a joke?

How do I ride a bike?

How do I catch a fish?

How do I program a computer?

How do I ask a girl out on a date?

How do I drive a car?

But after he was diagnosed with epilepsy, I began to fear the questions that I knew he would eventually ask. I went from wanting to be the person he went to for answers to the person afraid to disappoint him when he asked questions for which I didn’t have an answer.

Why is this happening?

Will it ever go away?

How do I live with epilepsy?

These questions may be the biggest questions that he will ever ask because they are the biggest questions that I have ever asked. I’m also on a search for answers, but I don’t think I’ll have them before he poses the questions to me because not every question has an answer. We may never know why this is happening to him, but it is clear that this is our path. We may never know if it will go away, but we know that is here now. And we may not know how to live with epilepsy down the road, but we are doing the best we can today.

Rarely does life go according to plan, but we are facing a life that can’t be planned. How my son is each morning, depending on seizures and side effects, determines what we can expect from the day ahead. It’s impossible to predict anything in the future when you can’t predict the next day.

In the beginning, this uncertainty shut us down. I’m not sure it could have gone differently when my son was first diagnosed with epilepsy because we were fighting for his life. But even after he was stable, we were consumed with finding answers. After four years, it has become clear that there aren’t going to be any. But instead of letting that pull us back into hopelessness, we’re trying to allow it fill us with gratitude for what we do have. Because we have today, and for a time we didn’t think that we would even have that.

I went into fatherhood expecting to show my son the things he needed to know. But maybe the most important thing I can show him is how to live without having all the answers.