I have mentioned before, everything has changed. Don’t despair. You will make it. Everything is not lost, but everything has changed. How you eat. When you sleep. If you sleep. How you vacation. Your job. Your priorities. Everything.

An example is the familiar cookout. Old friends coming together over drinks. The jokes used and reused are still funny, but comfortable and comforting, like a pair of old slippers. The thick plumes of charcoal smoke shooting from grills. Children laughing and splashing in the pool. You can find yourself sinking back into your old life.

And you might try it once, but, ultimately you can’t go again without taking your new self with you.

You can’t go, because you can’t enjoy yourself. You find it harder to relate. The base of sharing is nil.

When your 8-year-old is not toilet trained. When you have to keep him strapped in a wheelchair so he won’t strike out or flail at another kid. When you have to constantly monitor him so he won’t hit his brother for the 1,000th time and you have to counsel that brother when he says he hates his brother because he has special needs, well, that makes it hard to hold your solo cup and nibble at your burger and engage in talk on football, or work or join in the last discussion on technology or pop culture.

Your world is not completely centered around your special needs child, but it is affected. Easy jocularity, complaints of having to change a one-year-old diapers and hearing about how someone loves Ricky Gervais (despite his disdain and condescension of the special needs population), makes it hard to engage or relax. You feel the ebb and flow of the conversation float over you and see yourself stuck on a sand spit watching it all. You can still fake a laugh, extend a hand and grab a cold one, but it is all a joke. And not a funny one. Because the joke is the event when everything with your child seems so terrible and out of place and the joke is how you feel inside which has the capacity to make you feel like a joke.

Only at the end of the night, when you are home on the couch and your family is in bed and the house is quiet can you relax. With the sound of stale laughter still in your ears, you swear to never do that again as you reach for solace in the bottom of a bottle.