Foto Fabulous Friday

Getting Older and Changing the World...

Getting old is not for sissies. - Bette Davis

Jacob is three and a half, going on four. The bright light that this little person is in our lives, well..

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The last three and a half years has seen a lot of celebrating and a lot of challenge. These things coexist comfortably and become entangled in our memory in a way that somehow makes that bright light even brighter.

This Journal hasn't gotten much attention lately. Like everyone else, we are occupied with daily life and now that the Jacob is through and over so much of his medical challenges and updates are less 'critical' in nature, well I was thinking maybe the normalcy of growing up... getting older, doesn't need much journaling. Also, to be honest, since we lost our Aunt Berta last year, I was having some trouble hitting the publish button knowing she wouldn't be there to read it (grief has a way of sneaking in to so many places.)

I think I was wrong though. Wrong about getting older not needing journaling. I think it does.

We have some work to do and none of us will be as well equipped to do it unless I keep writing/sharing.

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See, we have this little ambassador in our house that changes the way we look at things, expands the way we understand things. He is remarkably the same as other three and a half year olds and at the same time very different.

I think we should probably keep talking about that.

A blog I sometimes visit had these words in a recent post...

Like it or not your child has been born into a life of advocacy. By the sheer nature of their disability and their difference and by the circumstance of the timing of their arrival - they will live a life of cutting new paths, challenging preconceptions and prejudices and opening the way for others who follow. We are still into the generation of children who are growing up in homes and schools rather than institutions and workshops. We are still fighting with schools, with neighbourhoods, with communities for the right for belonging, even while acknowledging that welcome still may be a generation or two away. The fight is not yet won and the ground gained is not yet firmly ours.

The only way I know to make that ground gained more firm and to help accelerate the evolution from belonging to welcome is to keep talking about Jacob, so that we and the army of people who love him learn to be comfortable with disability and difference .... maybe in a way that we may not have considered or felt before. That's the kind of stuff that changes the world.

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Lucky for all of us, that expansion of our understanding disability/difference does not necessarily require heavy reading or intense study. Watching this little boy navigate the world with the same kind of tenacity as any other three year old is all that there really is to do.

He will do the rest for us.

Trust us.

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The journal is back.

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