The sandwich kid

Tycen and Roman take up so much of my time and energy. Roman is especially consuming right now, obviously. When each of my kids were born, they were each promises of an idyllic being. My babies were perfect, and really, they still are. But, as a mother, you can never imagine something might be wrong with your child. They are supposed to meet their milestones, grow like weeds and live normal lives.

What's normal, really? In most circles, Tanis is what people think of as "normal". She's an average kid with a huge heart. Of course, in my world, she's so much more. Tanis is sunshine on a dreary Michigan day. She is love, exuding it from every pore in her body. She is a caretaker and plays mother hen to her brothers. She accepts her role and makes the most of it every day.

Tan's role is the filling in the sandwich. Look at a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You see two pieces of bread, blatantly obvious. At closer inspection, you may catch a smear of jelly peeking out from between the sheets of baked dough. That's Tanis. She's not the first child noticed in the family, but she brings the flavoring. Without Tanis, I fear that my life would be bland lately.

I'm not knocking the boys, I love my boys very much. It's just that making delicious homemade bread is a tedious process. You knead endlessly, set the dough out to rise, punch it down, and start over. Raising Tycen and Roman is much the same. It's a process of doctors, school and research and implementation. Again and again. Making bread takes time and energy. The better you knead it, the warmer the environment, the more it rises. That's my task. I knead the bread, again and again, and watch it rise.

Jam is a different story. It takes a little sugar, but the natural fruit does most of the job. The flavors are already there, they just need a little coaxing and cooking to come out in a delicious puree. That's Tanis. She was born with all the tools to be as sweet as jam. We just need to throw in a little more sugar every now and then and some gelatin to congeal the natural fruit into a semi-solid jam.

Like I mentioned before, jam gets the shaft when you look at a sandwich, though. You hardly notice it at first glance. The bread overwhelms it. The boys overwhelm Tanis a lot, and I feel bad about it. She wants to go to school like her brothers. When Tycen was Tan's age, he was starting his second year of school already. Roman is only two and has already started in a formal education environment. Tanis is jealous, and rightfully so. She'll won't start school until next year with kindergarten.

Visitors, like Roman's teachers, and those outside of the house, like doctors, focus their attention on the boys. Tanis is unnoticed many times. I feel for her. She wants their attention, too. She obviously craves it, but those people just aren't for her. She understands on some level, but on a more primal level, she wants what everyone else has. It's hard to witness her going through this.

It's cliche, but I love each of my three children the same. Sure, I love different things about each of them, because they're all individuals, but I could never say, or think, I love one more than another. Never. I just want everyone to know that I have three children, not two.