Living with my son’s Cerebral Palsy

The last day since that tentative diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy has been surreal. In many ways, nothing has changed. While my husband was very resistant to the idea of a handicapped child, I had long reconciled myself to Nisarga never being “normal” – whatever that is. For me, Nisarga is normal. He is my only child. I have no idea of how else it could be.

I had expected the diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy for over two years now, since all my efforts to learn the Feldenkrais method to help Nisarga kept coming to ideas used for CP patients to be most useful for us as well. Not to mention that the low tonus in the trunk and curled hands were something I saw daily in my son.

So, in a way, nothing should have changed really, beyond reconciling to a new and hectic way of life. Yet today feels different.

He is eating well, sleeping well. I did new movements with him, he was able to push himself back in his walker for the first time today. It is almost as if the diagnosis released us from some kind of limbo we were in. As if I was unconsciously treating Nisarga’s condition as a temporary thing and postponing inconvenient things till he was better. And somehow, realizing that this was it was also a call for action to start living NOW.

Don’t know if that makes sense, because we are most certainly happy on a daily basis, but today was …. different.

I feel in me a resolve to not let Nisarga’s increasing weight prevent us from doing things and am actually planning on taking him out on bicycle rides with me. I have been wanting to visit local villages and interview villagers as a part of my interest in grassroots blogging for a long time, which I kept postponing because there was no one to babysit the child and so on. And bam. All of a sudden, today I feel I can take him along with me and we can have fun visiting places and seeing people and learning about them.

Instant freedom.

No idea what this mood is, or how long it lasts, but I hope it lasts forever.