My therapist charges for her services on a sliding scale, meaning her prices adjust depending on her clients’ income. It was an amazing gift to be able to receive mental health care during a time when I was our only source of income and my husband was a student.

I sometimes look at the age-old greeting, “how are you?” with the same kind of scale. If the person genuinely wants to know, I have to ask myself, do they know where we’ve been in the last week? Month? Year? If the analogy of a baseline income = our baseline “okay,” then our scale has shifted considerably from 2020 to 2021. We have new treatment, a new diagnosis, more people on our team, and most significantly, appropriate medication that keeps our son stable, able to sleep, and functional in relationships. It’s a place I could hardly imagine, and when I compare it to last year, I’d give it a 10 for sure.

Then there’s that awful thing where you start to recognize the baseline for other families. That my 10, which I want to celebrate and enjoy, is really a 3 for a “typical” kid. Sometimes I get too confident or used to our new normal, and I think we can go to a park with someone else or do something out of routine. Life is better! Why shouldn’t we try to live a little?

And then I’m rudely awakened. I’m living on a sliding scale, where our normal is nowhere near the norm. We still need to adjust our routines, how and when we venture out in public as a family, because it is almost certainly going to present challenges.