A Dream Come True ...

The summer I turned 15 (I'm almost 18 now), my mother was diagnosed with a rare form of MS. It's called Devic's disease, and she spent most of that summer in the hospital while they tried to figure out what was wrong with her. My dad worked all day and then visited her every night, and my older siblings had summer jobs and were away most of the time. So what would normally be a teenager's dream--being left alone all summer with no one monitoring you--came about under the wrong circumstances and really wasn't all that great.

I cooked most of my own meals, cleaned what needed to be cleaned (occasionally), and spent the rest of the time being a teenager--but with a lot of lonely hours in between. I won't lie. Sometimes it was wonderful to come and go as I pleased. But other times I really wished that my parents could have been around more. And of course, my mom and what was wrong with her were almost always on my mind.

She came home at the end of that summer, but what used to be easy tasks for her to handle now were almost impossible--or she did them very, very slowly. We used to be a family always on the go, but our outings came to a screaming halt. All the things that we'd all taken for granted were now just memories.

Since then my mom has certainly had occasional spells, or "setbacks," but nothing that compares to the shock of that summer. She's working toward recovery, but it's slow. My life feels more normal now, but one change is that we don't plan too far ahead because we never know what the future will hold. On the other hand, I truly believe that everything happens for a reason. So we may not know right now why this had to happen to my mom, but eventually we'll find out. That's comforting to me.