hiking without happy meals: humor in the dark

Right now she is asleep in my bed. She crawled in there sometime around midnight. Today isn’t going to be easy.

When I scheduled the series of eye appoints I was not holding a planner, electronic or otherwise, I was holding the gymnastics training schedule. The first appoint is today which canceled the surprise trip to the lake for the Wild One’s birthday. Good thing Beach has no idea. Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with my oldest & closest friend shooting the shit & making a plan to get through all this and then a surprise hour on the group W bench with T talking about life.

What we’re up against: even as little as 4 hours a day (which would be the minimum) of patch time will sentence Beach to near blindness. That means no reading & no writing & no time off for mom. Because it can’t be just go watch 2 movies. It has to be something that helps her work the bad eye. The plan is mix physical challenges with mental ones; pass, catch, navigating a playground, a walk, the zoo, the aquarium, the aviary, board games, Legos, cards, drawing, Children’s picture books read by mom, & big puzzles. Followed by exhaustion, frustration then we have our regular school work to do.

And three days a week 3 hours of gymnastics. I don’t know how this is going to play out. She will lose some vision in the good eye, run through half a dozen prescriptions in a matter of months, all while in the middle of Fall Gymnastics Competition Season.

We had Guest Coaches yesterday & even though I told her to tell them she had vision issues she didn’t. So when they set up a vault exercise Beach had never done before I had to do what I dread. I walked out on the floor in the middle of practice to tell the coach that Beach does not have depth perception. Her team mates curiously listening, the other coach moving towards us, “What is wrong?” She asked. I explained as briefly as I could about Beach’s eyes. It left them baffled. For 2 hours Boo had rocked practice. And despite my concerns about the set up at vault which included a large square mat, a mini tramp, & a handstand fall-flat on yet another mat she continued to rock. I could hear her teammates asking her questions about what she could and could not see. She comfortably answered each one.

“I had no idea,” the Coach said after practice (with her it is so easy not to know). “She is so talented it is amazing. I love to hear stories like this.”

We all do, but to be honest I would rather not be telling it about my own child.

I would trade all the holy shits and all the stunned amazements for simple greatness without adversity. She would too. When Beach asks ‘why me’ we joke because it levels the playing field. I wonder if there is any truth in that.

She told me once that when she dreams she can see. I really hate to wake her up today but we have a lot to do. The first appoint just got moved to an earlier time because her records from the Moran Eye Center were waiting for the staff on the fax & after reviewing them they realized two hours was not a long enough slot to put her in.