Dear Parents: Then and Now

I wrote the letter to parents last. I wanted any parent who picked up this book to immediately sense empathy. I wanted them to know that we as parents recorded our experiences honestly and even ignorantly. We did not have all the answers. Nobody did.

I wanted to send a message of hope to anyone desperate and scared enough to read a book with the words seizure and epilepsy on the front cover. I hoped our stories to be like a remote friend that had been where the reader was, having conversations about our common experiences.

This is not pleasure reading, it is desperate, panicked reading. I remember when I started looking for anything that might help us. We were grasping for any straws that might lead to a better treatment. No drugs had worked. We had many side effects, but no progress.

I also wanted to let the parents know that a cure may not be in the cards. This was a giant pill for us to swallow. We kept searching for a magic drug only to discover there were bad drugs and worse drugs and possibly no drug that would control Rose’s seizures. Our search for an effective combination took twenty years.

We were fortunate to find the right treatment only because we never stopped searching and we had a neurologist who refused to give up on Rose. If you have not found the right neurologist, keep searching. Giving up gets you nowhere.

This may take over your life for a while. Save a tiny part separate. For me, it was my garden. It was always waiting for me to shed my role as Seizure Mama and return to being the Flower. My garden has saved my soul and sanity over and over again when everything else fell apart.

Get yourself a little life raft to hold on to and keep you busy during the storms. A purposeful hobby that your troubled mind can escape to., to take your thoughts somewhere else besides epilepsy. I have sewn hundred of masks through the pandemic to curb my fears. I could not stop the virus, but I could help protect people I knew from getting it.

I want to highlight that your role as a parent is a supporting role. You do props and costumes and stay behind the curtain. You do not have epilepsy, your child does. Make them face it. Make them handle it. Make them own it.

They will need every scrap of strength and perseverance to get through this life with epilepsy. They must practice being tenacious and tough. They must develop their superpower of going it alone and fighting their own battles.

Getting back up is the tough part, but that is when the magic happens.

Seizure Mama