Sacrifice?

On Thursday, we have an exciting opportunity to spread the word about FX to our whole community and beyond. A reporter from our ABC affiliate KSTP is coming over to interview me about raising boys with FX, and to see the boys and try to capture them on camera.

I know. My first thought was "good luck with that." The boys don't exactly love it when strangers come over, and they will make themselves especially scarce if said strangers bring over a big camera.

I'm trying to figure out how we can make this work for everyone. I want them to get good shots of the boys and I want the boys to avoid getting too stressed out. I was hoping for a nice, warm, sunny day so we could do it in the backyard, but rain is projected for Thursday, so I need to rearrange my plan for the living room.

In our preliminary conversations, the reporter mentioned how inspiring it was that I'd sacrificed so much to raise my boys.

I was immediately uncomfortable with the term "sacrifice." I'm no martyr.

Everyone sacrifices to take care of their kids, and we wanted to have a family. Granted, given the boys' special needs, we may have given up a bit more of ourselves than most parents end up giving up. But I don't sit easy with the inference that I'm regretting anything.

I explained how I'd given up a job to stay home with our kids, yes, but it wasn't a sacrifice. Actually for me, the sacrifice was in giving up time with my kids in order to go to work and earn money. This is not to say I didn't appreciate the other benefits of working outside the home - getting time away from the kids to be with other adults. I certainly did, and I needed that time away. But I didn't exist to work that job. It wasn't my passion.

Having kids was. Ever since I could remember, I'd wanted to have kids of my own.

As far as personal aspirations beyond child-rearing goes, I've always had dreams of being a writer. And my boys have given me the perfect subject, and Fragile X the most fitting theme. The experience of having twins, finding a diagnosis, exploring the world of special needs children, and working to ensure the boys are getting everything they need has been a mostly positive one. I don't know, maybe I was made for this. I don't necessarily believe that old adage, "God won't give you more than you can handle" necessarily applies across the board, but I do think that my personality and background makes me a good fit for the job of Zack and AJ's mom.

So no, I haven't really sacrificed anything. I'm not happy my boys have challenges. I'm not happy they suffer from such extreme anxiety and intellectual disabilities. But it's well within my capabilities to help them work through their problems and to make sure they get all the help they need. Beyond that, it's actually something I think I'm sort of good at.

As soon as TV interview appears online, I'll post it here. Isn't the Internet a wonderful connector?