What People Often Forget About Special Needs Dads

I have often contemplated if having a kid with special needs makes for a special dad. I’d like to think so, but the truth is I still burp, need deodorant and annoy my wife, so it is likely that I am ordinary. But maybe that is what makes me special – the fact that I am ordinary.

How dads navigate the path of special needs is a miracle. Now, there is plenty of attention given to moms of special needs and that is very deserving of course. The problem is we dads sometimes disappear into the background. People forget that…

We hear and see the same things;

We experienced the loss of a dream;

We held our breath many times waiting for a sign of life after the resuscitation of our kid;

We ponder endlessly about the future;

We feel anxiety about how the world will treat our kid;

We are frustrated with doctors, wheelchair suppliers and government bureaucracy;

And we still wake up in the morning years later, shell-shocked.

I don’t think any dad of a kid with special needs would profess a particular uniqueness, but we would describe an enlightenment that we have been awarded because we are on this journey. We know stuff, stuff we never thought would occupy our mind. None of us signed up for it, in fact if given the option I wouldn’t sign up for it again because I am weak – but I would never ever want to live life without my daughter, Sunny, just the way she is… Do you see the paradox?

I sometimes see other dads and their kids playing and I feel this ache, like a heavy piece of lead has lodged in my heart, stopping the blood flow. It isn’t that I am jealous because I love my daughter; it is the constant reminder of what is not. The “what I have” is precious, the “what I don’t have” is hard.

But when the alarm goes off in the morning, the world doesn’t wait and I am forced into the magnetic field that insists life moves on in the same direction despite the ache. I still have to go to work and contribute, which feels so odd when my parallel world seems like a different planet. I force myself to engage in incidental conversations in order to embrace the benign clockwork of life despite the feeling of chaos – because I know if I don’t, I will drown in myself.

So what does it feel like to be immersed in the normal when there is nothing normal about my life? Bloody weird. It feels like breathing water instead of air.

I want ordinary but I don’t know how to be ordinary anymore. I guess that makes me special. Problem is I didn’t want special, I wanted the mundane, but I know myself well enough to know that if I had the privilege of mundane I wouldn’t even know how lucky I was. The irony is, for us to be truly aware of a privileged life, we have to experience the opposite and for our family, the “opposite experience” is not rewindable, it is permanent.

As for my daughter, oh God I love her – and I would poo poo this blog entry and dismiss it as blah blah because no philosophical evaluation will ever change what it feels like to hold my daughter Sunny and kiss her cheeks.

This post originally appeared on JayMcNeill.com.