How easily we forget...

I have, over the past few months, been slowly trying to de-clutter our house. For a good portion of the last 8 years, we would often find ourselves with something that we couldn't quite figure out where to put or we didn't have time to handle at that moment. Inevitably, we shoved it in a drawer or a basket or on a shelf to deal with later. This has been my chance to sort it all out, throwing away what we didn't need and finding a home for all we wanted to keep.

A week or so ago, I found a stack of pictures from a trip I took with CJ when he was only 3 months old, visiting a pregnant friend at her mom's in Montana for a week-long baby boot camp. One in particular made me stop cold. It was a shot of me and CJ sitting on her couch. There was nothing particularly special about the shot, I was looking at him and he at me and we were both smiling, but it shocked me because I looked happy and content and thrilled to have this little guy next to me.

It shocked me because I suddenly realized that I never think of myself as being happy when CJ was a baby. I know I must have been, obviously, but to me his first year has become a time of continuous crying and sleep deprivation. My strongest memory from that time? The night when Craig woke up and came into CJ's room at 3 am to find me yelling at him in his crib that he HAD to sleep because I couldn't take it anymore. Craig calmly took me by the shoulders, led me out of the room and put me back in bed and then handled CJ himself. Definitely not my strongest mom moment, but a pretty accurate picture of where I was at the time.

During one of CJ's occupational therapy sessions last year, I was speaking with the director of his program and talked about this time. Another mom overheard and chimed in with her story, almost identical to mine. She actually said that she felt like she was suffering from PTSD by the time she made it through her son's first year. The director said that it was completely typical behavior for infants like CJ and her son, the crying and inability to sleep consistently are an early symptom of their disability. It was amazing how relieved this made me feel, even after all these years, knowing that I wasn't alone in my experience and that it wasn't something I was doing wrong that made him so different from his brothers.

Still, I realized last week that I haven't put it behind me because I haven't managed to rebalance my thoughts of that time. As challenging as he could be, CJ was a sweet and adorable little guy who had lots of wonderful moments and I'm doing him and myself an injustice by not focusing on our happy times together as well as the struggles. I've never sat down and put together an album of his first year as I did with his big brother. I'm thinking this is the time to do that and revisit ALL the memories of that year.