Lesson Four

I have come to witness just recently that negative aspects of living invades your space whether you like it to or not. Xavier never had to deal with the negative aspects of relationships. He never experienced the pains of being misunderstood, nor was he knowledgeable about the hurt that comes with rejection, or the abuse at the hands of those who truly never saw his worth. He never had to come home crying. He never had to be disappointed.  He never had to be stood up. I say all this to say that though he never got the opportunity to experience the negative things in life, we who are abled body people have. Many of us have experienced being misunderstood, rejected, and abused. Many of us cried, sometimes all night long, and many of us have been stood up not necessarily from a date as much as stood up by the ones who we thought had our best interest at heart and really did not.

When Xavier turned a year in age, his life was altered a bit further. He had a major seizure that robbed him of his basic abilities. He stopped cooing, he could no longer drink or eat own his own, and the little personality that we saw emerging was lost during a hospital stay. He had to be put on a feeding tube. This hurt me immensely because it seemed for a moment that the hope of normalcy was taken away in a dash and I blamed the doctors who gave us the report for stealing the small thing that we had. How to move from phase to phase in life while developing and maturing is the challenge for all of us to obtain. We have successes and failures. My goal in this journey onward it to learn how to move forward.

Xavier had his surgery and we took that precious baby home almost a complete month later cherishing what we had. He was still with us feeding tube and all.

This is the fourth lesson that my grandson taught me: As hard as it is to accept change, adapting is a necessary aspect of living. We cannot change the things we do not have control over and many of the things we do, we often time manipulate it altering its effectiveness for positive change and growth. Think about it, who says ending a relationship, is a positive thing, or the loss of a job, and what about the passing of a dear loved one? How can anything positive come out of the most negative things?  When we accept what is before us and adapt to the essential, we begin to create an atmosphere for “change”. This is not easy. It is downright hard, but it is worth its weight in gold to the one who embraces it and allows it to flourish becoming the essence of who they are. It is time to look life in the eye, accept what is and what has been all while moving forward to that which shall come.

Lesson Three

Pushing through the hurt and the pain of life does not happen overnight, nor did Xavier’s progress.  He had to stay in the NICU (Intensive Care unit for infants) for a month leaning how to breathe on his own and then suck from a bottle independently before going home. He did just that and we were so elated when we got the discharge papers. Xay came home with a patch over his right eye, in attempts to build the one that was affected by his third nerve paralysis. He also had hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy, premature lungs, spasticity, seizure disorder, and eczema over most of his body.  

Fighting to live is not always a conscious decision. Sometimes it comes from the cheer fortitude of not wanting to dye. For Xavier, his fight was in his physical existence, but for many of us, it is from the emotional and psychological baggage that comes to weigh us down and handicap us along the way. Learning how to push through it all can be very challenging, but if done, is a benefit that yields great rewards.

Xavier’s first eleven months brought us so much joy. He went from not being able to do anything to following the mobile hanging from his crib, making cooing sounds, drinking from a Sippy cup, and eating stage two foods from a spoon.  He went from crying whenever he was stimulated to falling asleep while getting a bath and a rub. He accomplished one small milestone at a time not knowing which one's were right and which one's were wrong. He just did as he could do regardless to what went against the norm. 

When I reflect back over my life, I find that what held me back from so much of my potential was "myself." I made excuses for why I couldn’t, why I wouldn’t, and why I shouldn’t do a thing. All of my negatives became the evidence that I used to keep me from moving forward to where I truly wanted to be.

This is the third lesson that my grandson taught me: Negatives can only influence you when you take such negatives and allow them to become the dominate influences in your life. Yes bad things have happened, but it was my response that yielded more negative and it was also my response that would bring out the positive in any situation I found myself in. I had the power to choose. I had the power to live according to my intentions and not just live through a response.  My past experiences may have aided in decisions but at no time can I now say that they were the cause.