It's the bigger love of the family

“If you fail to plan, plan to fail.”

It’s a common refrain from motivational speakers, athletic coaches, and Navy Seals drill sargents.

You set your eyes on a goal and then you figure out how to get there - step by step, milestone by milestone, and deliverable by deliverable.

At the same time, if you ask most fathers, they’d say their family is the most important thing to them, i.e., the other trite saying of “Family first.”

And yet, there is often no plan following that sentiment that shows just how family is placed first in one’s life. Often, there’s an image of what it looks like to have put family first: smiling kids and wives, heavily filtered images of beach vacations, immaculate houses with white picket fences, and well-loved BBQ grills. But what’s missing is the how.

Our eldest (able) daughter turned 10 over the summer, and for the first half of her life, most of our family plan was taking the garden path. Our schedules revolved around our work, kids’ birthday parties, and vacations. Then along came a cross-country move, life-threatening post-delivery complications, and….Lexi. While wonderfully and fearfully made, she started missing developmental milestones almost immediately and had seizures leading to a week-long hospitalization at six months.

We were thrown into reaction mode— the lazy river we were riding became turbulent Class V rapids, and our family struggled. We were in survival mode and left our eldest to navigate school alone, replacing bonding time with screen time. The age gap didn’t help matters. Our eldest certainly loved Lexi, but we were all unsure of how to enable them to bond together as sisters.

Once we got Lexi’s diagnosis and set sights on helping her develop to the best of her ability, I started worrying about how this would impact her older sister. Movie scenes flashed in my head of the resentful sibling, the angry able child who didn’t ask for this, who didn’t understand why we couldn’t be a ‘normal’ family.

On a work trip with a colleague who’d grown up with a severely disabled sibling, I asked for advice.

“Let her see your struggles. Let her see you doing your very best to provide for them both. But make sure to involve her as much as possible, and she’ll come out of this with something beautiful that other kids won’t get a chance to have.” He went on to share stories of backyard dinners, camping trips, and celebrating the wins of his sister as a family.

It gave me hope and renewed fire. Since that fateful conversation my wife and I have actively planned ways to incorporate our eldest in Lexi’s life. I have always wanted two daughters, and part of that was wanting them to be best friends. It just turned out that we needed to be more involved in bringing that dream to reality.

Here are some ways we do this (roughly in order of most to least consistent):

1. Prayer over Lexi before bedtime: our eldest hears us praying for healing, prophesying continued progress, and asking for Lexi to come to have her own relationship with Jesus

2. Involvement in Lexi’s physical therapy: we have a series of ‘patterning’ movements we do every day. We have our eldest move half of Lexi’s body, always on the side Lexi prefers to look at, so she can see her sister

3. Grocery trips: I take Lexi to the grocery store on Saturdays so she can experience life (and show other people that kids like her exist). She loves helping with the “beep beep” scanner and is rewarded with a mini cake from the deli. Now, I take both girls out so our eldest can push the stroller and also share in the treat. Bonus: this also gives my wife a breather on the weekend

4. Dinner: this one is already tough due to school and therapy schedules, but we try our best to sit down together a few nights a week at the dinner table to talk life, speak truth, and spend time doing ‘normal’ things

5. Game night and playtime: Lexi loves to be moved about, and our eldest is currently in her gymnastics/dance era, so we have them take turns doing flips on our crash pillow. We also play chase, with the girls taking turns “chasing” one another with my help

Don’t get me wrong - our home life is still chaotic and disrupted. But the above are some of the practical ways we try to reach our North Star. I’d love to hear yours, too. 

And if you’re looking for additional resources:

Sibling Support Project
Sibling Leadership Network

We’re gonna fill our house with happiness,

Duke

P.S. - Sorry for the delay in delivering today’s issue. We were wrapping up another great PT intensive with Stacie from Starlight Intensives. If you’re looking for DMI therapy in the Tampa Bay area, check out her Instagram and give her a shout.