“Sucking it up” The Way Life Is
by Rick Johnson
My five-year-old daughter gave me the name for my book, The Way Life Is. She was telling her parents to suck it up and get on with life. We had a disabled daughter and she had a disabled sister… So what? That’s the way life is! When the sky is cloudy, the sky is cloudy, it’s not blue!
That five-year-old is now pushing 29 and still she has her disabled sister, and we are still sucking it up. The book is about that some of our years of “sucking up” the fact that daily we faced an absolutely unchangeable, agonizing and stressful situation—a child whose severe genetic disorder was not going to get fixed or go away, along with a few other challenges!
“Sucking it up” was the proper and responsible thing to do, so we did it… over and over and over again… without thinking much at the time about the sacrifices and their potential negative effects.
Vacations, hobbies, time with the guys, and lots and lots of other things… even relationships with your other children can get pushed to the sidelines by the 24/7 demands of disability in the family. Other children might well feel cheated for not getting the same attention, which can have a life-long effect on them, and the next generation.
Marriages crumble under far less stress than that of disability in the family.
So, being able to accept the way life is when it is terribly difficult can be nearly impossible if you want to hold it all together, and I mean ALL of it, over an extended period of time. Balance is crucial to any sort of sane survival, but what is balance? How much of oneself can you chop off through the course of a lifetime before giving up, or without spending your last years full of regret?
Sacrifice is easy when you’re young and resilient, and your child is a child, and the challenges are new and, at least, interesting, and there’s lots of support. You take pride in the sacrifice for your child and simply turned away from a lot of previously held interests and ambitions.
However, when your resilience fades with age but the challenges do not, when your child is middle aged but still a child, when tangible rewards are not forthcoming as they are from a lifetime of sacrifice to a business or career, and when it’s no longer interesting but simply harder and harder to cope, it’s damn hard to tell yourself yet again to suck it up! You realize that the way life is, is actually the way life was… over and over and over. With age, you long for that clear blue sky more and more, just to see it once more, just for a moment before you die.
But, instead, you do suck it up and carry on, because that’s the way life is! I hope you enjoy my book.
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Genre – Self-Help / Mental Health
Rating – PG
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