Cervical spondylosis is what I have been diagnosed with.  That and spinal stenosis.  Put both together and they spell ouch!  Onset can be gradual – like getting into a car accident and whiplash occurs.  Your spine might miss-align causing pinching of the nerves in the neck.  Left untreated, it can worsen like mine.  Hopefully, tomorrow it will be a little better.

When I was younger, I always feared that my children would inherit my illnesses: asthma; eczema; epilepsy and allergies. Did it ever occur to me to ask my soon to be husband if he had any illnesses?  Not in the least.  He didn’t take medication… he seemed just fine… no allergies… no skin problems.  The only thing I noticed was that he had a very strong spirituality about him.  Was that abnormal?  At the tender age of 17, I thought highly of him for having such strong religious beliefs.

We would read through the bible together… go to different denominational services… nothing seemed to be wrong with that..  (don’t worry, there is a point to this)

Pregnant with my first child when I just turned 18, I thought it would be a piece of cake!  You give birth, have a baby and as long as she had 10 fingers and 10 toes, she was normal.  Right?  Nope.

Our daughter came out literally swinging her hands looking wild eyed and tugging at her pink receiving blanket.  Was that normal?  I had no clue.  She came home and was a screamer from day one.  Not the eat, sleep, poop baby.  It was that PLUS scream; scream; scream.  I thought that I must be doing something wrong.  She was brought to the doctor; diagnosed with colic and treated with an elixir.  Still, she was a tough baby.  Never happy, always craving attention.  Of course I blamed myself and still do to some extent.

It also seemed as though her daddy had his priorities a little mixed up.  He refused to work for anyone else but with his family. A carpenter by trade, it was feast in the summer, famine in the winter – literally.  I thought, “a normal person would take care of his family.” Was it me???  With no health insurance, and his disregard for planning for the future, I was so confused.  I would urge him to work where benefits were provided.  “You can’t eat your benefits”, he would say.

Now pregnant with our second child, it was even more difficult to care of our first.  She was growing and getting into anything and everything.  At the age of 10 months old, she had such a fit because, after holding her, I had to put her down.  She became so angry that she through herself onto the floor, face first so hard that she knocked herself out.  She came to fairly quickly, but I thought, how could this be normal??  What was wrong with my child?

Monique was 16 months old when her sister was born.  Only one year and 4 months old.  The first day she saw her newborn baby sister, she tried to hit her on the head with a can of baby powder. (this was before baby powder was packaged in plastic)  “Why would she do that”, I thought.  I was so perplexed at these actions.  It would be unthinkable to do such a thing to an innocent child.  Why would she feel the need to injure her new sister?  Maybe she just didn’t know better?  These violent tendencies progressed.  One would think Monique was exhibiting sociopathic behavior…  no remorse… no thought of the consequences  to her actions. Maybe at that age remorse or consequence was a part of her brain that had not yet developed.

During that time, I had asked my husband for a washing machine.  Taking two babies by taxi to the laundromat was just too taxing.  My husband agreed and promised that he would ask his father to charge a washing machine to his credit card.  I was so excited!

He returned that evening with paperwork.  I thought it must be the contracts and/or paperwork from the washing machine purchase.

No….the papers later revealed that my husband, Normand and his father purchased a house.   The papers were the deeds to that house.  The one I had not seen yet.  The washing machine?  Well that came in by way of an old electric tub style machine that used a hand crank to wring the water out of.  The idea of taking a taxi to the laundromat seemed more inviting than working with an old fashioned washing machine.  But, it washed the clothes – the bright side.  Try to keep looking at the blessings rather than the curses.