Stacie Sherman

Once upon a time, there was a mom. She was a very special mom, with very special kids. She adored and embraced them. They were amazing.

Every once in a while, though, she wondered what it would be like to be just a mom. Not special. Just a mom.

“You’re really good with children,” a friend said one day, sounding surprised. The night before, he and his wife had brought their young grandchildren to karaoke night at the community clubhouse.

Special Mom was there without her daughter, for once. When her daughter was there on karaoke night, they didn’t stay long. And while they were there, Special Mom was usually on her feet, entertaining her daughter or getting her something to eat or drink, or taking her to and from the bathroom.

That night, though, her daughter was with her caregiver. So when Special Mom’s friends walked in with their granddaughters, she jumped up to greet them.

Within a few minutes, Special Mom found herself holding the older girl’s hand, walking her around the clubhouse and then dancing with her to the karaoke music. They were instant buddies. Grandma and grandpa kept telling Special Mom to go have adult fun. But she was having fun.

People didn’t ask Special Mom often to watch or spend time with their kids. She had enough on her plate. But she loved children. People saw her as a super Special Mom, because that’s all she knew. But she liked to think that she would have been a super Normal Mom as well. A super Mom. Just Mom.

All children fascinated Special Mom – her two in particular. But she wondered – would she have been as good a mom if her kids didn’t need her to be?

Sometimes, she had child envy. Moments where she wished she could just take her daughter to a movie and stay until the end. Or to a family gathering and let her run off with other kids while Special Mom mingled with the adults. Or she could go to a restaurant and dine without getting up every 10 minutes. Or sit on the edge of the pool and watch from afar as her daughter played and swam.

Special Mom’s motherhood experience had never been normal. Her kids didn’t eat normal food or sleep normal hours. They didn’t make friends like the other kids, or learn the way other kids did.

On occasion, Special Mom did get the chance to slip into normal mom – really step-mom – shoes. Her husband had four kids and sometimes she lived vicariously through him. But even her husband saw her as Special Mom. She sensed it when she chimed in about his kids, a feeling that she was speaking without experience and probably shouldn’t.

There was a part of Special Mom that would have liked the experience of raising kids without special needs. But that was not meant to be for her. So when she got the chance to spend time with “normal” kids, she cherished it.

Special Mom loved spending time with other people’s kids. It was surreal to her how kids without special needs were. How fast they learned, how observant they were. She saw things in those kids that she didn’t get to see in her own.

On the other hand, she saw incredible things in her kids that others didn’t get to see in their own. And she was grateful for that.

Having special kids made Special Mom enjoy time with other kids. It turned her into a person who cherished and celebrated all the amazing small stuff. She enjoyed coloring or doing a puzzle or reading with a toddler. She liked running around the community clubhouse with her friend’s granddaughter. She soaked it in, their intelligence and optimism and normalness, even if only for a short time.

While Special Mom liked to think she would have been a good Normal Mom, she would never know. She was OK with that. She had her amazing kids and step-kids and tons of little ones in her world to spoil and play with.

This post originally ended here. But something was nagging me about it so I asked my husband to read it before I hit send, as I often do. “Well?” I asked. “It’s good,” he said. “Sad, but good.”

I know a lot of my posts are sad. I have family members who ask me to warn them when my posts are going to make them cry. Here’s a belated and future warning to them: most of my posts will make you cry. This is my therapy, after all. We don’t often use therapy to talk about happy stuff. But even so, my intention was not to write a sad post and have people feel sorry for me. My intention was to work through my feelings over a recent event in my life and maybe explain my thinking, open some eyes.

If readers get one thing from this post, I hope it’s not that I’m sad. I am way more happy than I am sad. Am I often reminded of what I don’t have when I spend time with “normal” people and their children? Of course. But I still love it, I soak it in. Do I sometimes wish things were easier or different? Of course. My life has been a broken road, and that’s OK. Who travels a straight and smooth path? I try to focus on what I do have, not what I don’t. And I have plenty.