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I got an email today from our friend S about her son. Her teenaged son had aplastic anemia and was hospitalized for a long time last year. She sent us updates via email and showed enormous strength and faith through the whole thing. He is doing well and is healthy enough to have a job and get on with his life, for the most part. Her son has a friend, however, who is not doing as well and S passed along a letter from her mother. The descriptions that I have gotten from S and this other mother have made me bawl every time. The things that they have been through with their children are mind-blowing. I cannot even begin to imagine having to sit at my child’s bedside day after day after day while medical complication after medical complication takes my child farther from good health. To have the faith that it will all work out and that my child would leave the hospital even in the face of evidence that they won’t. To have, at best, guesses about what will happen with new medications and treatments. To have to try to answer your child’s question “Why is this happening to me?”

I’ve typed a kazillion things to start this next paragraph so far and have erased them all. Anything that I type seems completely inadequate to express how I feel. Let me just say that I am incredibly grateful for The Tater Tot and leave it at that. I can’t imagine my life without her and hopefully, I will never have to find out what that’s like. I cry when I read these mother’s emails because I know the strength of the love they have for their child. It is enormous and all-encompassing. A love that will allow you to do whatever it is that you have to do to be there for your child. No matter what.

Makes all the day-to-day gripes seem really, really stupid.