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Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  Coping, caring, hoping, sharing
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Coping, caring, hoping, sharing

Correspondences with parents from all over the world, and overcoming a writer's block. The Moppet Show returns

Kyra had a wonderful time over what was being called the ‘last big snowfall’ of the winter early this month. Photographs by Kadambari Murali WadePremium
Kyra had a wonderful time over what was being called the ‘last big snowfall’ of the winter early this month. Photographs by Kadambari Murali Wade

In two-and-a-half months, my life has changed, as has how I look at the world at large. I have made wonderful friends—who I didn’t know existed till a few weeks ago. I’ve shared intimate secrets with complete strangers, who have promptly shared theirs. I have probably egregiously offended others by telling them to stop wallowing in self pity and focus on what they have, and have thus risked sounding, worse than shockingly offensive, alas, just positively pompous. I have also read more mail, talked to more people and replied to more messages in these 75-odd days than I have in the past few years together.

And yet, through all this talking and reading and writing and feeling, I just haven’t been able to write one coherent line of my blog. And believe me, I’ve tried. I just couldn’t get myself to write this when I had to respond to someone, it made me feel guilty, and weird.

Kyra has shown tremendous spirit in the face of adversity to beat that monkey on her back.
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Kyra has shown tremendous spirit in the face of adversity to beat that monkey on her back.

To be honest, I just needed some time to get back to the people who had reached out to us individually, and that took time. The strange thing is, I’ve been a reporter and writer for so many years, and written on a variety of subjects and got responses on many of the stories and subjects I’ve written on. Yet, I’ve not been as touched, or moved, or humbled as I have been by the responses I’ve received when I opened up about our lives as our daughter’s parents.

We’ve been okay, these past couple of months, and have basically concentrated on taking things one day at a time, and like the rest of most of the U.S., have also focused on getting through the snow and freezing cold.

Kyra, despite being just three months out of three significant surgical procedures, has been doing very well. Except that she’s back in our bedroom. I’ll save that for another day, and no, it is not a happy story! More on that later though, it is something many of you will probably empathize with.

So coming back to where I went, when I left you all at Christmas, I made some promises to myself. One of these was to reply to the mails and messages I had started to get in response to this blog I began in the end of September. They began slowly at first, but by January, I had more than 200 messages of hope, shared stories from fellow parents about their children with hearing loss, autism, vision issues, cancer, Down Syndrome, dyskinesia, various GI issues, cerebral palsy, fetal alcohol syndrome, childhood apraxia of speech, muscular dystrophy, ADEM, diabetes and well, more. Many people reached out through Facebook, some through Twitter and LinkedIn, and others through friends of friends, etcetera, showing me, yet again, how connected a world we live in.

Kyra, despite being just three months out of three significant surgical procedures, has been doing very well.
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Kyra, despite being just three months out of three significant surgical procedures, has been doing very well.

Most though, were from parents who were kind enough to thank me for sharing Kyra’s story and our life, saying it had helped them get through their day, knowing we had got through ours. It was, as I said, incredibly humbling reading those messages, because honestly, my writing about Kyra is my way of coping. It’s as simple as that. And then it is also is my way of telling her, when she can understand one day, hopefully in the not-too-distant future, that we love her more than life, and are so very proud of her spirit, her courage, and the way she deals with everything life throws at her.

All that interaction—responding to many of those mails and messages and letters, forging connections, building bonds, hearing about other people’s lives and how they cope, what they do—took more than I thought out of me.

I heard some really sad stories, yes, but I also heard some wonderful ones that reinforced my belief in the power of faith and science and love.

On a positive note, I have some global solutions going on here: A suggestion on how to cure Kyra’s insomnia from our nanny’s family in El Salvador; the sharing of an Iranian recipe for her GI and heartburn issues; a sugary Croatian home remedy for the frequent sore throats that she doesn’t really have (but I appreciate being forewarned!); the news of an underwater spring in Eritrea that ostensibly heals hearing loss; and the advice to grow a Rongoa Garden, which, apparently, is a Maori medicinal herb garden.

I’m really glad for the indulgence I got from Lounge, for I needed this time to correspond and share and “be shared"—for lack of another word; to spend time with Kyra while she healed, to relax a bit after six months of high stress, and finally find the time and space to grieve for my father.

So how is our princess? Well, more on her next time, but here’s a quick update. She lost her first tooth on Sunday. At least, we assume she did. One minute it was there, next minute, she was swinging from daddy’s arms and it was gone, and it wasn’t anywhere around on the dark carpet either, so we have to assume she swallowed it.

We were at the birthday party for a friend’s two-year-old; a doctor and a dentist were both in attendance, and both, I suspect, tried not to smile as they told me to watch for it in her diaper—if I felt like bothering.

My husband helpfully suggested we sift through the do-do in the diaper for that intractable tooth so it could be cleaned up for the tooth fairy, but as he hadn’t volunteered for either the sifting or cleaning, I made the unilateral decision to not “feel like bothering." We can do the tooth fairy thing with the next one and pretend it is Tooth No. 1. It’s the thought that counts.

The Moppet Show is a blog by Kadambari Murali Wade about her experiences of bringing up a child with multiple special needs. Read the previous blogs here.-

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Published: 18 Mar 2015, 01:57 PM IST
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