It’s been a long week. One of those weeks where just a lot of things took a lot of effort.
The week began with the trauma of a new haircut. Somehow I ended up telling the nice young woman who was cutting my hair that it needed to be shorter. Like much shorter than it usually would be after being trimmed.
In other words, way too short.
That was Sunday.
Monday was back to work, and I had that wonderful effect where the haircut turns out to be even shorter after you wash it for the first time. I pretty much felt like I had gotten a haircut before reporting for duty.
The week dragged on from there. A series of day long meetings and then a lot of work to make up for being in the day long meetings.
It would have been a much more brutal week, had it not been for a phone call on Thursday afternoon that brought some really great news. Our younger daughter Maddie found out that she had gotten her first acceptance into a college.
Of course that is a big deal in any high school senior’s year and in any parent’s life. But it’s a little more so in our case.
You see not all that long ago, I would have pretty much done anything–including selling my soul to the devil–if it would have guaranteed that Maddie would survive the nine-hour brain surgery she needed for the rare neurological disorder that she had been diagnosed with. All I wanted was for her to be better and be able to return to the first grade.
As part of the long journey that led to the moment of this procedure, we discovered that Maddie had had a series of small strokes in her brain and that they had left some damage.
It turned it out that the damage impacted her ability to read and process language. For a time, it wasn’t clear that she would be able to finish high school, much less consider going to college.
Fast forward over a decade to now, when Maddie found out that Jacksonville (Florida) University wants her to come to their campus for the next four years to pursue a degree. A pretty emotional moment for me, as proud parent and admirer of just how far Maddie has come.
At the same time, her older sister Katy is in the midst of her senior year at the University of Maryland, where she her chosen course of study for her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology, has been greatly influenced by her younger sister’s disease. She is now applying to graduate school to continue her studies. I couldn’t be prouder of her as both a person and a student.
It has been a long week. But one that will always mean a great deal to me, not just for the milestone that it represents in my life, but more importantly in the lives of the two young women that I am so very proud to call my daughters.
And the really good news is that the hair has already started to grow in a little bit.