A Fate Worse Than Death?

This week I was getting my daughter ready for school and I began to wonder how life would have been if she didn’t have TSC. I realized that next week would have been the week she should have graduated from High School. I imagined how life was going to be. Would she be driving a car now, dating, after school job, touring colleges? So many things that I looked forward to when she was an infant that wouldn’t be, even things I was dreading like partying and friends I didn’t like that ended up being a bad influence on her. I wondered if she would have wanted to live with her mother and want little to do with me, like her brother did last year. I even worried about having the talk and hoping that when it came to sex, she would be responsible. So many things that won’t happen, so many milestones missed and so many bullets dodged. With that said, you would read this as if I described to you that my daughter had died at a young age. But she’s alive and well, currently playing with a toy in the dining room as I write this.

The other day I saw a post on Facebook about vaccinations and autism. Instead of the normal controversy of it being the cause. It said something along the line of, “Is having a child with autism worse than death”? It hit me pretty hard because years ago I resented my daughter and mourned all those expectations I had of her. I was terrified that I would raise her like a child for the rest of her life and everything I had pictured in her life the moment I first held her in my arms, was gone, stolen from us all. Was her condition a fate worse than death?

It took a long time for me to see that it isn’t. I was wrong because I still see her life as what I think it should be. She is still happy, she laughs, she dances, she colors, she has friends and she is loved by so many people.  She has her good days and her bad ones. She is still a moody teenager who is argumentative and sometimes she’ll spend all day in her room. She’s different by how she talks and acts. But past that, she’s still my teenage daughter. I need to be reminded of that sometimes.

There are things that will bother me. The stares, kids laughing at her and most of all people telling me how strong I am for raising her because they don’t know if they would have the strength. Those people make me angry because they are the type that sees a disability as the worst thing to happen.

As I look at her right now while she watched Mulan for the 200^th time, I’m just happy I’m  her dad.