The Before and After of Phin

I wasn't always the mother of a child with challenges.

I remember life before Phin. It’s not some cloudy time period I can’t quite touch; it’s stark and clear because although more than a decade and a half has passed, I was already well into my life as a wife and mother when he came to us. I can look back on the days of having only academic knowledge of FASD, of having only read but not lived out the consequences of abuse and neglect. I can still taste the assumptions I carried with me, still feel the edges of that comfortable assurance that if you loved someone enough, you could heal whatever else had come before.

Of course, it wasn’t true. I grappled with this for a long while, asking God to show me what I was doing wrong, and why this little boy who deserved so much better wasn’t being set free from the damage inflicted on him in his earliest days. It wasn’t a dark time, though it might well have been. I found that I could ask those questions and still trust. I found that I could hurt and still find joy.

In short, God showed me that what I was asking for wasn’t His best, and He accomplished this by giving me days where I saw that my idea of perfect so rarely lined up with His.

I’m a better mother now than I was before Phin, and I can say this will all confidence. All that head knowledge didn’t transfer to more love or compassion or empathy. It was the day in and day out of life with a preschooler who genuinely couldn’t follow a two-step instruction, and the nightly resets with a child whose sensory needs required a tight swaddle in a special, stretchy cocoon to relax enough to let sleep come for a few brief hours. It was the appointments where I had to shrug off my fear of confrontation to demand that a specialist acknowledge that my son was in the room, and the hours spent leading him through home therapy exercises.

And oh yes, it was the many, many times I felt crushing guilt over doing too little for this one child of many… and the many, many times I felt the same weight of guilt for putting so much effort towards one to the detriment of the others.

In a few short weeks, Phin will turn 17. He’s asked for a Spider-Man cake (I cannot make this), a Spider-Man costume (I cannot afford this), and two new sketch pads, one small and one larger (this, I can do!). The beauty of Phin is that even when presented with the inevitable cake topped with sprinkles and only half of his wishlist, he will be thrilled. He will tell everyone, everywhere that it is his birthday. He won’t remember how old he is, but he will celebrate nonetheless.

And this? This is what makes me so delighted to have left behind the relatively “easy” days of parenting before Phin. This is what makes me grateful to call him my son. Phin shows me every day what it is to simply be, to look for God in the moment, to rest, and that’s not something I really understood before he came into my life. I remember that time well, but I don’t miss it. What I have now is oh, so much better.

In Christ,

Heather