This started off as just a post for day 2, but became a work in progress along the way 🙂
While my interactions with Jordan helped me begin to understand that our differences were incredibly small, I would be lying if I said that they changed everything about what I thought about disabilities. While I learned the lesson of we’re “more alike than different”, I still held on to the thought that having a family member with special needs would make life much harder. Things like daily hygiene and supported living still rolled around in my head as challenges that would obviously make life so much harder for a family to deal with. The idea of daily hygiene or helping someone eat especially made me wonder how parents and loved ones managed to live this life without wanting the support of a group home or assisted living – why would you want to do this for your entire life, was a question that rang through my ears.
That summer our friend Cathy, who owns a respite company in Toronto, invited us to come and volunteer at the summer camp that they hold each year for their clients. I balked immediately. While the idea of getting away seemed wonderful, the idea of spending my summer vacation dealing with the realities of living with adults with developmental disabilities was a little too “real” for me. I would much rather spend my vacation on a beach or a cottage somewhere instead. Jess, however, was really excited and in the end, we compromised: I would spend the first week of camp with her and then go back to work for the second week, so that I could save my vacation for another time. I was gut-wrenchingly nervous for the weeks leading up to our departure. I didn’t know what to expect: what was I going to do for a full week with all of these people? What was I going to be expected to do that might be completely out of my comfort level? What I going to see gross and disgusting things that I didn’t want to deal with?
Wrong. I was totally and completely, 100%, absolutely wrong. That week changed my life.
I sometimes think that this is the key to acceptance beyond awareness – total and complete immersion for one week. That one week opened my eyes in a way that single days here and there weren’t able to do. From the moment we arrived, that camp was just like any other camping experience. We ate, we swam, we did evening activities, we roasted marshmallows and s’mores and sang songs by the campfire. We canoed and took shopping trips in town and we laughed. We laughed so much, laughed until my belly ached. We pulled our air mattresses out of our tents and watched the summer meteor shower and talked about life. We talked about boys and girls and relationships and families and dreams. It was no different than spending a week with any friends. And at the end of that first week I went back to work, aching to be back with everyone. At the end of that week, I went back to work and booked off more vacation days so that I could get back to camp and back to these people that I had come to adore in such a short amount of time.
Of all things though, that week began to show me that our expectations of life adapt. Yes, we helped with some eating. Yes, there were some hygiene things to help with. Yes, some of the campers needed a little extra support, but that just became part of the daily routine and such a small part of the picture. The laughter, the relationships – the essence of life – that all stayed the same. Life is different, absolutely, but for the first time I saw that different isn’t bad or worse, it’s just different and different can be amazing.
