Not everything is about the epilepsy, but it sure seems like it.

Today I've made a decision.  I've decided I need to put words to paper.  I've written before, and I've blogged before but only about seminal events (or ovular events, if you will).  I blogged the happy occasion of my son's match with his service dog.  I blogged our memorable summer grasping at straws in California with a wise 96 year old osteopath who was said to have magic fingers: magic enough to stop some children's seizures.  Not magic enough to stop my son's.  

But it's the day to day living and surviving with epilepsy that confounds me, that drowns me.  It's the tumor-like tentacles that touch everything, everything.  Each of the relationships in my family has been affected: the dyads, the triads and the whole of the four of us.  Any family who lives with epilepsy understands the peculiar sanity in scouring the landscape on a remote trip into the wilderness to scope where a helicopter could land, you know,  if it needed to.  They understand the havoc epilepsy wreaks on a marriage.  The contorted way of parenting, ever weighing what fair is.  

Cesare (Chez' a ray) is 17.  He is the glass half full.   In his twelve years of epilepsy we have subjected him to treatments both traditional and non. Medications, diet, osteopathy, nerve stimulation and surgeries.  Oh, the surgeries.  They dot a landscape in my memory that is vast and arid and has the scent of stale coffee. Seven surgeries, seven day long vigils in a hospital waiting room.  Ces continues to seize most every day. He never complains or sinks into self pity. 

Cesare is more than his epilepsy.  But it's hard not to see 
everything cast is that shade.  His identity, his abilities, his daily routine.  
And mine.  

I am good at distraction, keeping in forward motion.  I'm very good at that.  I work with difficult adolescents in an Alternative School and when I am with them, I am wholly there. I see  more children in my private practice and am present for them as well.  I keep my mind stimulated by teaching college. I teach about the issues I am passionate about.  I teach students about the seeds of violence against women, which are right where we planted them..all around us. 

I will take a break from forward motion and allow myself to hover, be still.  I won't fall if I can write.  Thank you for catching my words.