It is time. It is time to say goodbye to another year. This year has been, in many respects, the hardest year or my life, although I never would have known it last January 1st. No, I greeted the new year back then with no idea of what was coming for me. I spent New Year’s Day playing laser tag with my kids. Edward was progressing in Taekwan-do, and the future was looking bright.
In February sure, I was hit by a car, but I also hosted my first movie screening! I took my kids to see an ice castle! It was a pretty good month, despite all of the rental car drama.
March began with the devastating news that an important blogger and friend had died, but continued to bring new adventures and exciting developments my way. It almost seemed as if this year would be one of balance, the bad with the good. As hard as things were, there were just so many great things happening to keep me going.
April certainly continued in that vein. We finally got our car back! I hired a funk band to open our Easter service at church and did not get fired, so that was good. But then I had to spend my birthday at the DMV. Gun violence continued to escalate in this country, and it seemed like no one was willing to do anything about it. Still seems that way actually. The problems of the world can really intrude on the happiest of personal lives, can’t they?
May was where the cracks started to show in my personal life as well though, as Edward’s health problems returned with a vengeance. Also the dog got sick and I had to milk her. That was gross. My wife left to finish grad school, leaving me alone with the kids, and I started to feel the stress. Not that nothing good happened, but rather it became hard to focus on.
Plenty of good things happened in June! I became a published author! We won a sweet piece of original artwork! And then we won another one! But there I was, home alone, trying to deal with the stress of Edward’s epilepsy. If only I had known then how much worse it was going to get, I would have been very happy with my summer situation. But I suppose that’s just the way of life, isn’t it?
In July we began the first of what would be many hospital stays. It sucked. And yet we did so many other fun things! We took an amazing trip to Maine with some friends. We saw “Weird Al” Yankovic live in concert! We visited family and saw a Red Sox game at Fenway Park! Why did I spend the whole month worried? Looking back it is clear to me that the balance was always there, but I lost sight of it for a while.
In August I got to record a new album with choral group Counterpoint. Today I get to sing with them again at Burlington’s First Night celebration. The album isn’t out until next month, but it will be worth the wait, I promise. I did my first ever interview, with Grammy-winning artists The Okee Dokee Brothers! What a great month. But it was also the month with some troubling local murders. It was also the month my son almost died at camp because he had a seizure and the people there didn’t know what to do. Edward’s seizures got worse, and more frequent, and it started to dominate my whole life.
We sent him to school in September, which had its ups and downs, but my month was taken up by the new opera I was doing, and also with worrying. It was around this time that I started worrying that Ruby was not getting the attention she needed, with all of our parenting energy directed towards Edward. But we did manage to have a little fun in the midst of all of it.
I considered skipping my work trip to Kansas in October due to Edward’s health, but I went anyway and managed to break my computer while I was there. Maybe I should have stayed home. We all went to Maryland for our annual RennFest trip, and we built a new playground when we got home. We decided to keep living life, despite health problems intruding on both of those events, and it was going okay for a while, though we spent many more days and nights in the hospital.
It wasn’t until November that things really went completely off the rails, though the sense of dread had been rising all summer and fall. Halloween had been a disaster, what with new meds, more seizures, and no idea what to do next, and the first weekend of November set off a chain of events that led to my first week of not posting here at Tenor Dad since I started writing over 5 years ago. We spent that week in the hospital, and most of my posts that month were about me trying to deal with a terrible and worsening situation.
And then, just like that, things seemed to calm down. We have had a relatively uneventful December. The stress remains, but the seizures have become controlled again for now. Only one this month. And we finally got his genetic testing back, so we’re switching things up again this week. We are going to try something new and see if we’ve found a more long term solution. But we have survived the year, and now it is over.
I have hope for 2016. My best friend is getting married, and I can’t wait to go stand with him at his wedding. I am going to a blogging conference, so maybe I will get even better at this “thing” I keep doing. We are going to go on some fun family trips. And I have faith that Edward’s health will continue to improve, as we head to Boston to get some fresh eyes on his case, and as we work towards full control of this frightening and frustrating disease. I struggle to find ways to write about how his illness affects me without compromising too much of his privacy. I hope to do a better job of that over the next year.
So let’s ring out 2015 in style. There was good, there was bad; I laughed a lot, and I cried even more. Whatever it was, it was a heck of a ride, and it feels good to be alive and heading into the next great adventure with all of you. Thanks for reading, and for making this journey with me.