Ain't life funny.
You think you have your life all neatly squared away, you have faced and accepted everything that has come your way and you are feeling good. Then..........
Well this happened to me recently. I had accepted my disability and had accepted that I needed help from my family and friends to do things. Then it hit me, out of nowhere, the biggest downer you could imagine hit me. I went to sleep on a tuesday night and everything was fine, but when I woke up on the Wednesday, I felt as low as I could get. I was in tears about being stuck in a wheelchair, I was utterly despondent at needing help and I felt like a failure to my daughters. Where this all came from, I will never know but it was crushing me. I felt that the only way out was to end it all so that I wouldn't be a burden on my wife anymore. If there is one thing I have always hated about my disability, it is the fact that I need my wife to clean me after I have used the commode. Now, in this depression, the need to have my butt wioed was too humiliating to bear anymore. Seeing my 7 year old daughter adapt herself to the way I can interact with her was suddenly too much to stand, she desrves better than that, she deserves a father who can do all the things a good dad will do. Looking out of the livingroom window took on a depressing aura as I looked at people wander past going about their daily lives unencombered by a wheelchair. Life was just shiznit. it wasn't worth it anymore. Then I looked at the benefits of being dead. My wife would be free of the horror of dealing with my excrement and urine. She would be free of helping me dress and having to wash me. Her life would be so much easier and best of all, she would be free to find a whole bodied man who could look after her for once. My daughters would all be able to enjoy their lives and not have to drop things to help their daddy out. my 7 year old would forget me soon enough and would learn to accept an new man in her mummy's life who could do so much more with and for her.
At no stage did it enter my mind that my family do things for me because they love me and that they do it willingly. I just could not see that side of the equation.
Surprise, surprise or should I no surprise at all, my wonderful wife Ann-Marie spotted that I was in a very private hell and smashed her way through my walls and raod blocks to find out what was going on. She held me whilst I cried like a baby and then when I had stopped, she gave me that blasting of my life for being an idiot. It shook me back into the real world.
I am now better and smarter because I now know that there will be times when I have a bad time of it and that when I do have one, I need to lean on my family. Here is the best bit, my middle daughter's fiancée had told me he will kick the hell out of me if I ever get like that without turning to him. I asked him why he felt like that and he said that it is because I have always been there for him. Funny that, I didn't think I had done anything out of the ordinary for him.
Life is a funny old thing ain't it!
