Everyone needs a little hardship in their life. If everything was sunshine and rainbows, they’ll never understand how much of a crapsack life can be.
To someone who’s never been seriously sick, being healthy is just a fact of life. They don’t think about how lucky they are that they can walk around and look at the world. Really experience things. See and learn and touch and exist, without worry about anything going wrong within themselves.
Someone who doesn’t have allergies doesn’t need to worry about trying new foods, or always having their EpiPen on them at all times. Just in case. They don’t think about how nice it is to eat salsa and feel the burn on their tongue, when others know their stomach won’t be able to handle it.
Oh yes. And money. Everyone loves complaining about money. Nobody ever has enough of it. But when you’re scraping off the bottom and looking to the state for help to get (most of a) dinner on the table. When you have one television and no cable. When you borrow a friend’s computer to do your taxes because the ancient Windows 98 can’t run the programs to do what you need to do. When you realize that, no, you don’t have any tissues.
You know, diapers are expensive, and kids don't like going to sleep. But sometimes, children are sick or need surgeries, two or three or ten, before he's even a year old. Sometimes they're born prematurely, or there was a complication, and you can't even touch your child for weeks after he's born. My cousin’s girlfriend has a child. And this child may never grow to be like you and me. She might never be potty trained, and she may never read Hop on Pop or Green Eggs and Ham. When mothers gather around and say, mine was walking at a year old, mine was talking at two, what will she say?
Life sucks.
But, I guess you need to see how much life sucks before you can appreciate how great the little things are. I have myself. I have my dog. I have my hands and my feet and my family and my friends. I guess that’s enough, even if I can’t walk up the stairs sometimes.
((Just thought I'd mention, not all of those things are from my life. Most are from the lives of people I know. Friends and aunts and cousins and brothers. I'm not complaining about my life, just so we're clear. As I said, I have my dog.))
 ilafatyu · Sun Jan 08, 2012 @ 06:23pm · 0 Comments |
