Confessions

In my previous life before children and even before being married, one of my first jobs was working in a small company in the accounts department. My boss, Julian really took a liking to me and wanted to teach me a lot about accounting, but being a small company he didn't pay very well and was very hands on with all that happened in the business. He wasn't the nicest person on the planet and if anybody messed up he would shout at them a lot and would be really mean, all the staff would sit in the lunch room and complain about him, then he took our lunch room away!

Julian and his wife had a difficult time having children, they eventually adopted a beautiful little girl, she was blond with blue eyes, everybody loved her, especially Julian. They did everything for her and even at the age of 4, she was having tennis lessons. One day while playing on the tennis court with some other children, a thunder storm came over suddenly and all the children ran to the side of the tennis court and found shelter by a brick tennis wall (one that you practice on). The wind had picked up and blew the wall over, right on top of the children. They were all rushed to hospital, two of the children passed away from their injuries and the other two including my bosses daughter had severe injuries including brain injuries.

We were all in shock at what had happened, how could this have happened? Julian was a mess, but he still came to work, through it all and shouted even more at everybody! At the time I thought well "see bad things happen to bad people" and in a way I was glad this terrible thing had happened to him because he was such a mean person.

I know now that bad things don't only happen to bad people, how naive, young and stupid I was, no parent should ever have to go through something like that! No parent should have to see their child suffer or hurt, I am deeply saddened by the person I used to be, how could I have thought those things? Until I became a parent and even more so now that I too have a special needs child, I could not comprehend what complete and utter sadness, anger, frustration, guilt, rage , mourning my boss must have been going through.

Bad things happen to good people too, and its how we react to these bad things in our lives that can make us better people, but until we walk in the shoes of those who have experienced having a child that has been hurt, ill, suffering, delayed, brain injured, disabled etc, we cannot understand what they are going through.

I left to go work for another company soon after this all happened. Julian begged me to stay but I had made up my mind to leave so I did. He phoned me at my new job, I was a credit controller ( so I was in charge of making sure that all the suppliers were paid) he played a trick on me by pretending to be an irate supplier and saying that they hadn't been paid yet. Then he started to laugh, then I knew it was him. I didn't hear anything from him after that. I then heard from a friend that Julian was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, to this day I am not sure what happened to him, may be he is in heaven watching over me laughing, saying "See now, you know how it feels!"