Searching for the New Normal

We first heard the phrase, "new normal," when we lost our daughter Renee. When something that dramatic happens, life will never go back to the normal that it had been before. It's like going from a smooth flat road to a hilly winding road. Nothing about the two roads is the same other than the fact that they are roads. Nothing can be the same about life before and after those type of events other than it's still Life. Hills and switchbacks are normal for a mountain road, but if you found them in an otherwise flat landscape, that would not be normal.

We've found ourselves again searching for that road that will allow us to move forward. Normal has escaped us for the time being. We had been traveling along our normal path and suddenly found ourselves speeding along streets we could never have known were ahead of us. The hospital had become a sort of temporary Normal for us during the 7 weeks that Isaac spent there. But we knew that wouldn't be forever and we didn't want it to be either. When we got him home, we were in the process of moving to a new home, so things didn't get a chance to get used to being home again-let alone get used to having nurses in our home, boxes of medical supplies and equipment to figure out what to do with. Even when we moved, William stayed at my parent's so he could finish the school year, so we still weren't all together for most of the week.

Now we are all together in our new apartment. I am still trying to figure out where everything fits best, and we are still trying to make some kind of schedule that works for our family. Our winding street has merged into a massive junction of freeways and city streets and ours is a complicated path. I imagine there will be a few U-turns along the way. I feel like "Normal" is close, maybe on a parallel street, but, as with many street and highway systems, seeing where you are going is often a long way from being there. We are beginning to see what our New Normal will look like, but we still haven't figured out exactly how we are supposed to get there. One day, the things we struggle with will become second nature. Then I will feel like we have found the now elusive Normal.