It had been a hard week. The kind of week that kept me up nights and wouldn’t loosen its anxiety riddled grip on me. Abbey was struggling with anxiety over too many changes in her life and schedule. New staff at school. Respite and therapy workers canceled due to illnesses. Multiple rainy days in a row with little opportunity to work off excess energy. When this many triggers happen all at once, we often get a spike in behaviors such as hitting, throwing, self-biting, and tantruming. She becomes completely dysregulated and scrambles to express herself and her frustrations.

If the anxiety goes on for too long, we often see her go into what we call “The Quiet State”. Recent research calls this an “Autism Shutdown”. She doesn’t talk. She doesn’t sleep. She doesn’t eat. Her balance is off. Basically, all of her systems just shut down. While there are no reactive behaviors during this state, which is a relief, the silence is its own kind of hard. The waiting for my precious daughter to come back to her baseline, and to come back to us, just makes my heart ache as a mom. It’s so hard.

It was during this week that I took a little break to go shopping. Hobby Lobby is one of my happy places. Pushing the cart up and down the isles I began to look through the fun home décor items and imagine which things might look good in our house. Then I came to the sale isle. You know the isle with all the deep discounts. It’s amazing. I picked up coffee mugs with fun quotes, candles, and frames. Then sitting on the shelf Infront of me was a small square tile framed in my favorite colors. As I pulled it forward to get a better look. It said, “Blessed Beyond Measure” on the tile. And honestly after the week I’d just had, my first reaction to reading this was a feeling of disgust. “Nope”, I thought to myself, “That’s not my life.”. But then I noticed something. In the upper left corner of the frame there was a crack in the tile. It was a pretty large crack, thus the reason for it’s being placed there in the discount isle.

And then it hit me. Actually, this is just like my life. My life as a mom hasn’t been easy. There have been so many things along the way that I wished I could’ve done with my daughter. So many experiences we never had and never will. She’ll never get her driver’s license. She’ll never go to college. She’ll never be able to live independently. She’ll never even be able to take care of her own daily needs independently. She needs help with everything pretty much from the time she wakes til the time she goes to bed and often even in the middle of the night. It’s hard to say these things out loud let alone write them down. Our life in so many ways is like that cracked tile. A seemingly broken thing.

But when I look at all of the blessings that have come in this life. All of the ways in which I have grown, not inspite of the hard but because of it. All of the joy I have gained, even in the midst of sorrow. All of the ways in which God has created something beautiful out of the broken. I can truly say “Yep, I am blessed beyond measure”.

“Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us.” – Eph 3:20