Revelations

Sometimes light shows up in the strangest of dark places. Taking care of my 10 month old niece during the workweek has become a full-time job. It takes up an enormous amount of my time and energy, regardless of my body’s mood for the day. I start setting things up for her arrival around 6:45 in the morning for an 8 o’clock drop-off, and she usually gets picked up between 4:45 and 5:30 in the afternoon. I sometimes have to fight the fatigue for scattered hours throughout the day. In the end it’s the energy that I often don’t really have within me to give. I often have to dig deep inside of myself to find the things that are required for taking care of a baby all day long. It wears me down sometimes in ways that leave me wishing that I could just lie down and not wake back up…ever. That’s the dark place.

Over time taking care of the baby has taught me that I can do just about anything that I need to do within the course of a given day. Taking care of a young baby will do that to you. No amount of injury, pain, discomfort, or fatigue has been able to stop me from living my life with all of its demands. Of necessity I’ve had to learn to work beyond any pain and fatigue in order to balance my job resposibilities, the baby, and my personal life. I once thought that my motorcycle accident injuries had caused a major hindrance toward my ability to do “things” in this life. I thought that I would eventually have to live my life like some beat-up old dude who had to sit back and watch the world go by. However, my mindset concerning the more distant future has changed over the past months. I now feel that every demand and/or challenge can be met with a little bit of determination and grit. I feel that anything is possible and many doors remain open for me. That’s the light.