Calm Amongst the Chaos

So it happens. It happens when I am not expecting it. I really hate when it happens, but I also know that is what makes me “normal”.
I get hit by the mack truck of “what if”. Or what “should” be. I try to duck and cover from it, but sometimes, just out of the blue I am knocked on my ass.
Andi does this annoying thing where she asks us many times a day when our birthday is. She knows all our birthdays. Month and day. I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew the year. She asks me my birthday and I say “February 4” and she says, “No December 19th” then she goes on to say that “Daddy’s is February 26th”. It is actually rather freakishly and I am not going as far as to call her smart because the child still can’t pick out an A out of a line up. But she can tell you the minute my toe nail polish color changes and if my outfit is new.
Anyway, yesterday she was asking me the infamous, when is my birthday question, and I said it fast to get the conversation over with and I just thought for a second, what would Lily say at the 100th time she had to answer August 28th. What would be a reply of a 5 and a half year old responding to her annoying little sister be? And just as I thought that, I felt a dagger cut through me. Something as simple and a thought, a wonder, knocked me down.
I want to see Lily react to her sister. I want to see her tell her sister where to go with her questions. I want to see them bicker. I want to see them play. Sometimes I say and I do feel that we got the best of both worlds with both our girls, but sometimes I can’t help but to selfishly want Lily to just snap out of it and act like she should. I love to cuddle her in the rocking chair, but what I wouldn’t do for her to tell me that she doesn’t want to sit in the chair with me. What I wouldn’t do for her to want to play dress up with her sister. What I wouldn’t do to see her not struggle with every single thing she tries to do that just comes to all of us so naturally.
Sigh.
I know all this wanting gets me nowhere and sets me back further than where I was just the day before, but what can I do? It is human nature to want normalcy. And not normalcy in what our family now considers normal.
This whole process of having a special needs child is so Paula Abdul circa mid 1980’s “two steps forward, one step back”.