I sincerely try not to think about the future as much as I do, but what might happen in the future just creeps in sometimes. I’ll be driving down the road, see some teenagers leaving high school and wonder about Gage and Quinn as teenagers.

I wonder about the regular things…what trouble they’ll give us, how their grades will be, if they will be involved with school groups, and if they will be liked by their peers. Those thoughts usually lead me to the not-so-pretty thoughts about their future as well. Like declining kidney function and how that will affect them physically. Will they have to go on dialysis? I think about how old they will be when they have transplants and if we’ll be able to donate kidneys to them. I wonder about how being sick will change them emotionally and socially. When time permits my thoughts to wonder more, I think about how they will get insurance after college, if we’ll have the money to help them with the drugs they will need for the rest of their lives.

From 0-60 seconds I can enter the other side – by leaping. When I’m particularly vulnerable to frightening thoughts about the kids’ futures I think about how horrible my life would be if they die due to complications from this disease. It’s impossible to stop my mind from progressing from something as normal as seeing teenagers walking near a high school to thinking about the mortality of my kids.

It would be so wonderful to be able to skip along and only let my thoughts go as far as they need to in order to handle the kids’ current problems. Why do I leap when I should skip?

Perhaps it is a future coping mechanism. Like a Chronic Illness Readiness exercise. Perhaps I won’t be blindsided by disease progression. As much as I’d like to believe that I think I know it’s not true. I’m just going to try to skip as much as possible and leap when I have to.