Warriors Without Choice

It’s been a grueling week.  It’s hard to remember what’s happening every day in the summer.  Yes, I use the school calendar, but each week I have to think, summer school on Monday?  No, that’s over this week.  I program my brain, Tues Weds Thurs now until the first week of August.  Then I think about how to get ready with her while I get ready myself.  Do we both need showers?  Is it a Peloton day or not? Do I hop on at 5:30 or 6? It’s mostly six because Anna gets her meds then.   Will my morning be decided by that 6 am sneaky slide in her room to give her the meds?  Will it not be sneaky when she is awake already- either watching her screen or maybe the room gives the foul odor of why she is awake. It’s a trivia card each morning. Playing multiple choice with the answers.  I wait, see, and mostly HURRY all morning.  Sometimes I’m curling my hair while looking out the window for the bus, hoping that I can rush through it.  Yes, Anna is all ready sitting by the front door; you Warriors know this game of cat and mouse.     

The summer weekends are somewhat harder to work, but that has nothing to do with being a Warrior mom.  It’s the summer in Michigan, a lovely and vibrant time that we get only for about 90 days; it’s bursting with growth and sun!  

This past weekend was a lot of emotion. The normal work things, families that really don’t understand what we put into things, callers who have no clue what they are really asking.  But the most significant was the co-worker whose friend was brutally attacked and left for dead.  The person is struggling in the hospital, and all he did was go camping at a music festival.  All he did was go to sleep.  Then to be attacked!  For us Warriors, this hits a bit deeper.  

We have children who are suffering; we have many years behind us and usually have a legitimate reason.  But this mother whose son was just trying to live life.  I feel her pain.  I feel the days by the bedside.  Am I going home? When?  Is he going home? Will they find the person? We live these days, but we have a medical reason; they don’t.   

In the Warrior way of life, the why comes, but it is usually answered.  I’m thinking of all the families like this one, the moms who have a perfectly healthy child and then one minute they do not. They are Warriors too.  They are Warriors forever.  Lifting the Hartman Family in thoughts and prayers and, most of all, strength by that bedside.