The title of this post is probably the most overly-simplistic statement ever made about little ol’ me.
I don’t really have problems, and if I do, they are first world problems which are not really problems.
But functionally, I have problems. I am functionally disabled. This is why I can’t ever seem to quite clear my kitchen door frame even though I’m pretty sure it’s a) big enough for me to fit through and b) not moving from the same space it’s always occupied. Or why I often hit my head on the top of our van door frame when I’m buckling Jonah into his seat even though…right, it’s dimensions are never going to change. I lack depth perception, yo.
ANYWAY…my current functional disability is mental. As in the kind that’s really all in my head.
It’s kind of hard to explain, but I’ll try. Here’s a great example: recently Jonah’s private speech language pathologist, the famous Miss Kristen (also Sophie’s beloved SLP), finally was able to get him to cooperate for some actual testing so we can actually! know! for sure! what he needs to learn. That’s pretty exciting stuff, because then we can start working on these things and knocking them out one by one, just like we did with Soph, and get him where he needs to be faster. So I was pretty happy about all this, as I am one who likes direction and concrete stuff to work on with him. (Because I don’t actually know what I’m doing.)
Kristen gave me the results of both his expressive (what he can communicate) and receptive (what language he understands) evaluations and they were almost identical, which is fine and good (Sophie’s was much lower on the receptive back in her day). They both show that he scored just one standard deviation below average. Which isn’t terrible. Kristen was quite pleased. I mean, it’s ONE level below average, not two, not three. Sophie was tested when she was about 5 months older than he is now and scored way worse than he did. And she is a fully-functional, super-smart, socially stellar kiddo now.
So naturally I should be quite encouraged by these results and by the fact that we really know what parts of the evaluation he didn’t do great on so we know what to work on with him. And I am glad, of course, that his result was not worse. Because I didn’t exactly expect him to like, knock it out of the park or anything.
But the way I actually feel, is not the way I should feel. What I feel is just tired of dealing with it. I feel like I want this to be over. I feel like I don’t want to do it anymore. I feel like I want to fast-forward to two years from now when Jonah will be “Mr. Typical” (ohpleaseohplease) like his sister is now “Miss Typical”. I feel like a jerk for feeling that way because there are some kids who will never be “typical”, and are perfectly awesome just the way they are.
I’m just worn out by all the extra effort it is taking/has taken to help my kids learn language when everywhere I look there seem to be kids with parents who DON’T shower them with love and attention who are developing perfectly normally. (But on the inside I know their sweet hearts and self-esteems are probably not developing perfectly normally.)
What I want to feel is relieved. Relieved that we have goals, have a plan, have a road map to getting Jonah caught up on his language. I want to just sit back and bask in how awesome he is and how far he has come.
But what I want to do is take a short cut. I want this part to be over. I want to not have this worry in the back of my mind all the time always.
I’ll get over it, I will. But that’s where I’m at right now. Just being honest.
