Choose to rock

I'm beyond stretched at the moment.  The past few days have been a swirl of figuring out Speak for Yourself, spreading the word about it, and deciding how to start introducing Maya to it.  Oh, and working. And maintaining the homefront (our apartment, I mean, not America). Oh yeah, and taking care of Maya.  Not much time left for writing. 

Today I met with her teacher to demo the app and speak with her about which vocabulary we'll be opening to start with (opening & closing the vocabulary can be seen here).  Tonight I'll be setting it up because it's going to start traveling to and from school tomorrow.  I don't want to be nervous, but I am.  It might take a while for Maya to get on board, and to gain the skills she needs to work a communication app, and I'm worried that if we have a rocky start I will catastrophize that it will never work. 

In lieu of something fun and original, I bring you a little snippet of writing that I did that has yet to appear on this blog.  I wrote this as part of an interview post that I did for Love that Max (go here to see the entire thing) in December.  The last question was a simple prompt: "I rock because . . . " and it was my favorite one to answer:

I rock because…

I choose to.  Plain and simple.

I don’t want to have a child with special needs.  I don’t want my daughter to have to struggle and work hard to do things that come easily to other kids.  I hate watching her struggle to express herself, while other kids can chatter away incessantly. 

It’s not fair. 

So from time to time I get frustrated and have a good cry, and the other 99% of the time we just live life.  We play, we go to the zoo, we do art projects, we go to the dog park.  We make up silly games and silly songs and try to enjoy life as it speeds by.  We drink good coffee and cheap wine and laugh and I watch my crappy TV when Maya is asleep and I don’t dwell on the bad stuff.  I try not to worry about things until I need to. 

In the end, everyone has their own uncontrollable “it’s not fair” stuff . . . the unexpected death of a loved one, sudden unemployment, a cancer diagnosis, a spouse’s infidelity.  Life can throw a game-changing, tragic occurrence to anyone at any time, and in an instant things can go from just-another-day to things-will-never -be-the-same.   And every person who ends up on the receiving end of one of these curveballs has a choice . . . you can choose to mourn forever, to bemoan the unfairness and wish that you could go back to “before”.  Or, you can choose to have a good cry and move on.  To rock on. 

I choose to rock.