Recently, my closest friend whom I have known since such a small age that I cannot remember not knowing her came to visit from Sacramento. We were sitting on the floor of my living room doing that thing you do when you don’t get to see someone you love very often. We were going through the timeline of our memories. “Remember your Mardi Gras-themed birthday party?” “Remember when you got deodorant all over your prom dress?”
“Remember the cheesecake I made for us? The one with the white chocolate-covered strawberries?”
We laughed at how old we are now, but it got me thinking about my own personal timeline, and in review, I noticed a pattern. It seemed like the even years tended to be the hard ones.
- In 2008 I got married, which was lovely! But my parents also divorced later that year.
- In 2010 Nashville got hit with a thousand-year flood, devastating our neighborhood.
- In 2012 my son Charlie was born. This is a biggie because it was the best moment of my life and also the most difficult as he stayed in the NICU for ten weeks, often coding in the middle of the night and requiring oxygen. It was not a calm stay. We left with a tracheotomy, a diagnosis of Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome and brain damage. This was the year of suction tubes and oximeters and emergency trips in ambulances when the seizures started.
- In 2014 my twins were born. I had three kids under three, all of them requiring feeding eight times a day while none of them were mobile. I bought a triple stroller and a membership at the zoo just to get us out of the house. It was a lot.
- In 2020 the world entered a pandemic and life became both too scary and too small.
- In 2024, Charlie had his most difficult surgery: hip reconstruction. We are still on the mend both physically and emotionally.
As a former pre-med student and current crossword puzzle nerd, I find patterns fascinating. The algorithms hidden in life can highlight where we place our values, reveal the miraculous order of the natural world, and prove cases of both serendipity and Murphy’s Law.
I could look at the above list and write off all the even years for the foreseeable future or I could acknowledge that we do not live on a straight trajectory and find relief in that. It is not dark days from now until forever as it can sometimes seem when a loved one is ill or a job is lost. There are dips and rises in the future. Acknowledging these difficult years gives me space to be thankful for the upturns – Charlie graduating elementary school, taking my daughter to get her ears pierced, road-tripping with my mom to Florida, riding the Ferris Wheel on the Santa Monica Pier for my fortieth birthday.
There are so many good things behind and ahead. Noticing and then holding loosely to the patterns can bring comfort and appreciation for the rhythms of life. We need seasons of both stagnation and growth, loss and gain, rest and action. To name what phase you are in makes it possible to identify the next when it comes along.
Jamie Sumner is a special needs mom and author.
Jamie-Sumner.com
Author of the middle-grade novels:
