H
ave you ever paid atten-
tion to how many excuses
a day you come up with?
How many times a day you talk
yourself out of an idea? Or how
many times you hesitated, even-
tually decided to take action and
wondered what the heck all the
bullshit as about? Nope. My kiddo had a rare
genetic disorder. 1 in approxi-
mately 8500 will be born with
urea cycle disorder. (NUCDF)
and it wasn’t enough that he was
born with this and that he hung
onto life until his diagnosis, he
ended up having one of the rare
versions too.
For many years, I made every
single excuse I could come up
with of why I couldn’t change my
life, make the money I wanted to
make or write the books I want-
ed to write. It was in the moment of his
diagnosis at the age of 4, that I
realized I have been wearing my
excuses on my sleeve. His diag-
nosis barely scratched the sur-
face of my excuses.
Who wanted to hear from a foster
kid? I mean up until I had my
first kid, I was sure no one was
going to like me or even love me.
It’s like I was wearing the word
reject on my forehead. Exactly one year later, we were
referred for liver transplantation
because it was literally the only
way that his life could be saved
and nothing prepared us what
we would experience through the
recovery.
And then something amazing
yet incredibly hard happened. I
became a mom to an extra needs
kid. And not just something
doctor’s new something about.
We faced the balance of life and
death several times, to the point
that the doctors couldn’t do more
than support him medically. The
rest of the right was up to him
and every time I share that my
son has had 3 liver transplants,
people are shocked, and rightly
so.
Here are the parts I often leave
out of his story. I was in college
earning my master’s degree in
mental health counseling. And I
could have quit and focus on the
challenges, the chaos and used
everything we had going on as an
excuse. I didn’t.
As he was hooked up to the 9+
IV’s to keep him in a medical
coma, and the breathing tube
doing the breathing for him, I
was reading and studying for the
papers I had to write and exams
I had to take.
This entire experience has taught
me to live in the no bullshit zone,
and sometimes I call this walk-
ing on the level of your soul.
You have to be willing to shed the
48