validation and being an accepted mess

One of my favorite things about blogging is the community of it. I love to say something random, like "There is nothing grosser than wet cardboard", and someone responds and says, "Yes! Yes, that is the grossest thing! I validate your opinion!" On second thought, maybe that's not a totally healthy reason to love blogging. Nonetheless, I love that. I've come to realize that most of what I feel is shared, not normal, per se, but there are more people than just me who would rather have a root canal than talk on the phone for 20 minutes.

It's a fundamental human need, to be understood. I was such a lonely kid, because I was weird, and there were only 60 kids, maybe, in the whole school, and none of them were like me. Eventually I figured out how to find things in common with people, and it got easier after that, although there were strange corners of my brain that only got to be explored when I met random other kids, usually who had been homeschooled by hippies or something, or when I talked to their hippy parents, or my own hippy parents. 

There are those moments, as an adult, that I feel alone in the world, usually because of R2, and his disabilities. There are tons of people that love him, but I carry a special burden, because I'm his mom and surely I should be able to fix him, or at least know what to do. I don't, though. I feel like I'm improvising half the time and phoning it in the rest of the time. Once a month, I get to go to a support group for moms of special kids, and it is always a relief, just to say, this is how I feel, this is how it is, and they say, yeah, that's how it is. And none of us really have an answer, but sometimes, having somebody say, yeah, that's how it is, is enough. 

I'm not saying you can only be friends with people who have similar problems, or that people without significant problems are lame. I'm just saying it's nice to be understood, and that you and I are not alone in our human experience. And that's good.