A Thousand Reasons

When life gives you 100 reasons to cry, show life that you have 1,000 reasons to smile.

Recently I had someone ask me why Chris and I chose to adopt a child like…that.  

As you can imagine, at that moment a million thoughts and responses swirled through my head. My child is not like that. Sure, he has a heart defect. Ok, several heart defects. Sure, he has a pretty significant scar on his chest. But, he’s not “bad” or “wrong”, which is what that implies. No kiddo with heart problems ---or any other health issue—is.

The same day I had this conversation I saw this quote posted by the mama of another heart kiddo. It is so true. When having a child with multiple, life-threatening heart defects, there are 100 reasons to cry.

There are doctor appointments— so many doctor appointments.

There are surgeries and complications.

There is watching numbers and levels.

 There is rushing to the emergency room.

There are the doctor bills.

There is trying to find the balance of taking care of the “sick” child and still being there for the “other” kid.

There are sleepless nights filled with worry.

There is waiting and unknowns.

There’s no doubt about it; it’s hard. It can easily get tiring and overwhelming. I think the “that” opinion and attitude happens when people can’t see past the reasons to cry. I know I’ve said this before, but this journey of adopting and our crash course in cardiology is one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. But, it’s one of the best. While, for his sake, we wish that Kai did not have to experience all of the meds, and pokes, and appointments, it has changed who we are in ways that I would never want to take back. I think life-threatening illnesses tend to do that to families. It’s probably cliché to say, but children who are faced with death have a lot of teach us about what it means to live.

That has given us 1,000 reasons to smile.  As strange as it may seem, we smile more now that we ever have. I think we have more to smile about. Or, we’re just much more aware about what we should be smiling about.  Of course, we smile about pink fingers and good INR checks. We smile about how Kai calls the Ronald McDonald House the Old MacDonald House. We smile at Kai each morning when he checks on his “playhouse”, which is really just a set of flags in the yard right now. We smile how each night at bedtime Kai asks if he can have cottage cheese for breakfast. Focusing on the smiling instead of crying is intentional. I think it’s the difference between having joy, rather than just happiness.

While life is incredibly hard with Kai’s health problems, he has brought more joy into our lives than is possible to articulate in words. But, one thing we've learned is kiddos with health problems - -kiddos like that are full of love and spunk and hope. And smiles!

Some of our reasons to smile