I love my life

I wrote this a couple of years ago and I feel even more strongly about this now.

“You are so strong. I don’t know how you do it.” I heard those words yet again tonight. It was from a cousin of my husband’s. It is a comment I’ve gotten used to hearing and it usually has to do with the fact that my husband and both of my sons have autism, my husband and younger son have muscular dystrophy and my husband has some other health issues that make it unlikely he will continue employed much longer. The speaker finds it unbelievable that I’m going to school full time when the boys are 4 and 5. They can’t imagine how I make straight A’s almost every semester. They can’t conceive that I find time to be on the planning committee for the autism walk, mentor families of newly diagnosed individuals and still take care of my mother responsibilities. Usually the person who tells me this is quite religious and they think I some how have some kind of miraculous strength pulling me through. After all, they sometimes say, God never gives you more than you can handle.

That always gives me a good laugh. But, I’ll let you in on a secret, I have nothing. The secret to my so called strength: I believe with my whole being that this life is all I get, in fact all any of us get. This is a life of amazing beauty and grandeur. There are no do-overs and this life isn’t about waiting in some kind of hell on earth to get to the good stuff. This is it. Furthermore, God didn’t give me this situation of health issues to deal with. Simple genetics are responsible. God isn’t punishing me or testing me or seeing how good I am. I’m not “enduring” for some future reward if only I am good enough.

My secret is that I love my life just how it is, warts and all. When you don’t get a second chance you give your all to your first chance. I want to find out that my existence meant something now. I want to leave the world in a better place than I found it. Freeing myself from a belief in God gave my life a true purpose and meaning. I wasn’t some poor suffering creature paying for some distant ancestor’s sin. I was a being who came into existence from the circumstances of evolution. Hundreds of millions of years and millions of ancestors of all kinds came together to make me and all the things I see around me. How can I not rejoice in that? How would I show my appreciation for life by degrading it to a suffering existence that simply needed to be gotten through in order to get to heaven?

There has been a blessing in my disbelief. It has given me a strength I never knew before. I wake up in the morning sure in the confidence that I am doing the right thing as I watch my children are grow up loved, healthy and happy. I wake up knowing that this day will never, ever exist again. It is a glorious day – when you don’t believe!