Tag: memories

Time

On By huntersmumIn family1 Comment

Yesterday nearly passed me by. Five years since Pudding’s diagnosis of MPS Hunter Syndrome. Five years of knowing that we will lose our gorgeous boy before he turns 20. Five years since I gave up hope of being told it was all just a silly mistake. Five years of this roller coaster of treatments and hope and despair.

In the last few weeks I’ve noticed that Pudding has started getting darker hair on the corners of his lips. A reminder that time is passing and even though his brain is declining his body is still getting older.

But don’t cry for us. Not for long anyway. Because I have a secret.

I can stop time.

All I have to do is snuggle in close and let his head rest on my shoulder. Lean in to him and breathe in his hair. Breathe in the warmth and marmite and banana. Feel his hand grab mine to fiddle with. Drink in all the love and content that flows from him in buckets.

And time…pauses. Nothing else matters.

Letting go

On By huntersmumIn family, Uncategorized11 Comments

I think over this Christmas period I’ve found the secret to happiness.

That is, I’ve found it before, but never really known how to articulate it. Letting go.

Letting go of the way things ‘should be done’. Letting go of preconceptions. Letting go of the idea that the opinion of strangers actually matters.

It’s a path that many parents of disabled children have to travel. We have all sorts of ideas about how parenting will be: the experiences from our own childhood that we remember and want to repeat with our children, and those that we want to avoid; the plans for their future – school, university, work, marriage. And then the slow realisation that things are going to be different to our expectations.

Maybe that journey goes faster for those with disabilities apparent from birth, I don’t know. With a condition like MPS though, when development is relatively normal at first, the realisation is slow. Painful at first.

Pudding with an enormous smile, watching TV

Over the last few years we’ve gradually adjusted to Pudding’s world and at Christmas I think it’s even more apparent how far we’ve come from what I would previously have planned. He is at his happiest with his beloved cartoon films on tap, and getting plenty of attention from people on his own terms. So that’s what we do. Christmas for us now is at home, with family visiting. TV stays on.  We don’t buy any presents for him – he doesn’t need anything and isn’t interested. This year, he even stayed asleep in bed until we’d opened all ours anyway. He definitely doesn’t feel that he’s missing out and I no longer feel guilty about that. I’m letting go!

How things ‘should’ be done really doesn’t matter. What matters is what makes Pudding, and us as a family, happy. This Christmas in our still-feeling-new house is probably one of the best I can remember. Letting go doesn’t mean giving in, or necessarily accepting second-best. Instead it’s developing new traditions and finding the joy in small things.

I don’t really make new year’s resolutions, though I do sometimes have aims for the year. But maybe this should be the theme for my year. Letting go, and finding the joy in small things. There are definitely worse ways to live.

I hope 2020 will bring each and every one of you some joy too. xxx

Christmas contemplation

On By huntersmumIn family5 Comments

Christmas is one of those times of year when we often look back and see how life has changed. Sometimes for the better, sometimes worse.

Pudding in front of a large model polar bear.

I’ve been in a contemplative mood lately. Partly because of the memories that are turning up on Facebook at the moment: three years ago Pudding had just been undergoing testing for the clinical trial that he is now on. Having been through months of heartbreak after diagnosis, the trial brought all sorts of different emotions and worries – would be accepted into the trial? would it make a difference? how long before the treatment would be made widely available?

Three years seems like a lifetime ago now, and although I sometimes speak with other parents who are only just at the start of this MPS journey, it can be hard to remember, truly remember, what those first few months were like. The vagaries of the mind can be quite useful – protecting us from the worst horrors so we (mostly) don’t get stuck in the same loop for ever.

I know I’ve been through so many states of mind – despair, guilt, anger, hope, frustration – and they come and go in unexpected ways, spiralling through the months and years. Never linear, sometimes bursting back in when I think I’ve waved that one goodbye. I’ve come to realise that emotions don’t behave in the way I used to expect.

But lately one has still caught me by surprise and I don’t quite know how to label it. Content isn’t quite right as that implies I’m happy about the situation (I am often happy too but that’s a separate emotion) yet resignation is wrong because it’s too sad. I think the best I can use is acceptance.

I’ve talked before on the blog about accepting this new path, but I guess there is a difference between reluctant acceptance of something that we can’t change and this new feeling of calm deep inside. And that is despite, or possibly even because of, the fact that I do now think we will have to say goodbye to our gorgeous boy way before his time.That will always be something I would change in an instant if I could, and I know that any of those emotions can come back and thump me in an unexpected moment, but for now this is where I am.

All Around the World sticker book. Fold out scenes with 400 animal stickers.Oddly the thing that made me realise it was this book. I bought it five years ago, long before Pudding’s diagnosis and intended to give it to him when he’d grown up enough to be able to use it. Every year I have looked at it in my present drawer and known that time hadn’t come yet. He is nearly seven now, and I’m not sure he will ever reach the stage of being interested/able. And it’s time for it to go to someone else. Previously when I’ve given away a part of the life he will never lead, it has been almost a physical hurt. An arrow to the heart that says, ‘This wasn’t what you expected’. But this time? Acceptance with a smattering of fond nostalgia.

Actually, maybe I was wrong to throw out the word content earlier. I am happy that it will go to another deserving little boy. Content does have a place in this life alongside MPS, and I shouldn’t feel bad about that.

Since moving house, life does seem to have got onto a more even keel. And when I snuggle up on the sofa with my Pudding watching his wholehearted enjoyment of a film, or when Hubby tickles him and brings out his deep chuckle, or when he bounces in excitement with a snowball in each hand, that is what I feel. Deep, deep love and content.

On an end-note, I’d just like to say a thank you to each and every one of you for reading my emotional ramblings and following Pudding’s journey. Wishing you all a contented and loving Christmas!

Photos

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I love looking through baby photos, don’t you?

Those sweet little expressions they used to pull, the chubby cheeks, the memories they bring back…

And there’s the rub. Because the memories can be bitter sweet.

Whilst I enjoy Facebook’s On This Day feature – laughing at the funny things T used to say, or reminders of days out we enjoyed – sometimes it punches me with what could have been.

I might see a photo of the panto we went to a few years ago and realise that Pudding never says anything as clearly now as when he asked ‘Where de moo?’

A photo will come up of a hospital bed, and I’ll be transported right back to those terrible first few months where the only thing that seemed real was the knowledge that I couldn’t escape this nightmare.

Pudding aged 3Sometimes though the hardest photos of all are those from before diagnosis. When I had never heard the initials MPS. Photos from more innocent days. I look at his so-obviously-Hunters face and think ‘How could I not have known? Why didn’t I fight harder to get his delays looked into? Why did I let the professionals’ dismissals over-ride my concerns over the way he looked and acted? How could I have missed what is so obvious to me now?’

Pudding aged 2

But of course I couldn’t have known. I’d never seen a boy with Hunter Syndrome before. I didn’t know what that baby face with its broad nose and big forehead meant. I didn’t know what all the niggling little symptoms added up to. How could I have done? That’s the problem with rare diseases like mucopolysaccharidosis. You rarely see them.

And that’s why I keep on blogging and sharing pictures of Pudding. In the hope that one day, somebody somewhere will recognise these features in their own child and press for a diagnosis.

I can’t stop them feeling all that pain, but hopefully in the future they won’t be the one looking at happy memories and wondering why they didn’t know.