It's currently 2:14 in the early morning and yet I can't sleep. Things, thoughts (real and imagined) and random incidences run through my mind. I just finished a bout of crying jag. The reason: Josh.
My son is now 16 years old. He's a happy enough kid. Smart, slightly moody as teenagers tend to be, and completely involved in his online games. We try to have him be as socially active as possible but he tends to just put up with our insistence and then run back along to his "boycave." I worry a lot of the times, how he'll be when he grows up. I have a lot of worries. Mainly because he has CP.
He is, shall we say, vocally challenged. Up to this day, the only thing that he can say is a simple "mama" and that is still with some difficulty. Mostly he communicates with signs he mostly makes up himself due to his fine motor issues. Communication with him is a combination of patience and persistence and a lot of love.
Now, the reason for my current neurosis is that thing that always seems to slip into conversations when you are speaking with mostly the older generation. How "lucky" we are in the family to have a special needs child.
Yeah. Lucky. Now don't get me wrong. I do consider myself lucky that I am a mother to Josh and that I have a son who is brave, loving and with a good outlook on how he lives his life. I am eternally grateful that he is alive today and I can be with him unlike his twin brother, Chad, who was stillborn. I am lucky. But not in the way most people think.
The Filipino culture is rich in heritage, religious and nonsecular beliefs. A lot of things that were passed down from generation to generation on how to deal with things, on how to view situations and how to somehow give a totally random explanation on how the way things have come about. One of them is the belief that a special needs child will bring luck to the family.
I am not really certain if I am just overthinking this belief or I have come to feel like this due to the fact that this idea of being lucky always comes into play when they find out about Josh. It feels as if they are devaluing all the outstanding characteristics, hard work and awesome qualities that Josh as an individual brings to the table just because he is considered to be "lucky". MY SON IS NOT A LUCKY CAT ON TOP OF A TABLE WAVING HIS LITTLE PAW AT YOU SO THAT HE CAN BRING LUCK TO WHEREVER HE IS.
He is a teenager who sometimes I feel like is beginning to understand how the world views him differently. And it hurts. It really FREAKING HURTS. To see your son be shunned by other kids just because he's different. It hurts, knowing that he will go about his life a little differently and a lot harder than the others. And to tell it to my face that he will bring my family a lotta luck despite all the extra work that he needs to do and the extra burdens he has to feel is just really insulting.
