The Angst I Felt at the Prospect of Having an Average Child ... and Will She Ever Forgive Me for (Even for the Short-Term) Believing That About Her?

There was no question leading up to the days before her birth last June that my fourth daughter, Clara Hope, had some large shoes to fill. I think most babies coming into the world with older siblings do to a degree, but poor Clara has the gift (or curse) of truly incredible sisters.

Although her next oldest sister, Gabrielle, had by far the worst birth story, Clara's pregnancy was the most difficult (when they tell you that childbirth gets more difficult when you approach forty, they're not lying). I was uncomfortable all the time, my feet swelled, my blood pressure fluctuated, I had unspeakable migraines, I had weird bouts of confusion and pain that were ultimately tied to potassium and other vitamin deficiencies, and so on. Because of the drama of Gabrielle's birth, there was no question that Clara was going to be a C-section delivery, then we found out she was breech, so this opened up a whole new can of worms.

Anyway, her C-section was scheduled for a Friday morning, but my water broke Wednesday afternoon and she was born that evening.

The day after she was born, we were informed that Clara had failed her newborn hearing screening. They'd need to repeat it the day we were discharged. When they repeated the hearing test, she still failed. They set up an appointment for several months in advance and let us bring her home.

Once home, Clara decided that she did not like to nurse. Ironically, I've never been one of those vehement "breast feed or die" women, but at the same time, I've had incredibly good luck with my first three daughters and they breast fed almost to a year old. I didn't know how upsetting it would be for me that Clara wouldn't nurse, but it was terrible!

And then I got to feel like a selfish jerk for the first of many times, because here I was having a pity party about my baby not wanting to nurse and she was literally wasting away. She was at the doctor's every day for a week while we tried to figure out how to handle it (in case you're wondering, I became slave to the breast pump and we supplemented it with formula ... it was a very long summer).

We worked very hard to get her weight up, and things seemed to be going well, and then out of the blue, Clara stopped breathing one night. I was out with my oldest daughter celebrating her 21st birthday, and when I got home the baby was coughing and coughing, which she'd evidently been doing all night, then suddenly she stopped and couldn't breathe. It was a nightmare I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. They kept her in the hospital under observation for two days, and it was unspeakable. She was such a trooper, but the rest of us were collective messes.

The big stuff settled down after that; well, as much as possible with four children, a dog, a cat, and all adults working full-time jobs. I took Clara to her three-hour hearing screening, and she passed it with flying colors. Life is good.

And yet, I have this problem ...

Clara's sister Gabrielle is sixteen months older than she is. What that means, of course, is that it's impossible not to do a bit of comparing, no matter how hard you try to avoid it (and Gabby's so young still that it's hard to avoid).

Gabrielle walked early. She talked early. She is, at the age of two, the most naturally funny human being I've ever met. Her speech was slightly delayed by a year's worth of ear infections, but once she got tubes put in her vocabulary has taken off like a rocket. As a very young baby, her receptive language was unbelievable, and that has continued.

When she was a year old, Gabby said Mama, Dada, Ari (her sister), Mimi (grandmother), Howard (the dog), kitty, cheese, cracker, more, all done, and so on.

Clara says Dada. Possibly Mama. There are rumors that she said water once, but no witnesses.

When Gabby was Clara's age, she was building block towers that meet milestones set for three-year-olds. Clara bangs two blocks together on a good day.

I see what I'm typing, and I hate it. Gabby's my favorite child and is going to be an engineer, and Clara is going to be a bank teller, right? No, that's not it at all.

I have two other daughters, one an exceptional musician and linguist (I could brag for hours but I won't) and one a competitive gymnast (same). These two girls are superstars.

If our beliefs about Clara are tied to her crawling well over a full month after Gabrielle did, what is going to happen when you add in phrases like "Fulbright Scholar" and "elite gymnast"?

And so for awhile, we believed that Clara was just going to be an average child. In a family of academics, this is something that I think Jeff and I struggled with silently and separately ... what if Clara wasn't as smart as the others?

We've gotten to know Miss Clara Hope pretty well by now, though, as I'm sure you can imagine. I look into her eyes, see the sparkle, and wonder how I could ever have doubted that her mind is just as brilliant (and likely just as diabolical, at times) as every one of her sisters'.

My mother kept saying to me that, even if she wasn't smart, she wouldn't be loved any less, and this was always, always the truth.

Now we know that she is smart--too smart, not to beat a dead horse ... she sits at her day care and steals pacifiers from the other babies, laughs, then gives them back; she locates every possible piece of detritus on the floor (it doesn't matter if the floor was just vacuumed) and gets it into her mouth; she waves bye-bye and claps her hands when you say, "Yay, Clara!" and loves playing in her toy kitchen with her sisters.

It took us awhile to realize that Clara is a child that will never do something until she decides that she wants to do it. Not walk, not talk, not crawl (although she started doing that this week), nothing. It occurs to me that we do at times treat Gabby like a trick pony--"You have to see Gabby count to ten ... her Hulk impression ... her rendition of 'Happy Birthday to You' ... how she hits the high note in 'Let it Go' ... her block towers."

Nope, Clara saw that writing on the wall and decided to pull this average thing. Too bad we're on to her ... although I think it's been a tremendous learning experience for all of us.

I loved Clara Hope when she was inside me, I loved her the second she was born, and I've loved her every minute since then. I would not love her any less if she was not exceptional like her sisters because I love her for her, which is of course how I got to see that she was never "average" at all, even after I'd resigned myself to it.

I don't know why the idea of an average child was hard for me, but Clara helped me come to terms with it, just before she looked at me again with that sparkle in her eye so much like Gabby's and said, "Mama."

Living With Learning Disabilities as an Adult

There is a basic assumption that I am intelligent because
a) I'm a teacher
b) I have an advanced graduate degree
c) I'm a writer (not prolific, true, but one of these days ...)

This is kind of a difficult topic for me to get into because it crosses into the personal more than I'm necessarily comfortable with, but I strongly believe that this is a topic that is under-addressed in society.

I found out when I was a junior in high school, after eleven years of public education, having my IQ tested numerous times (it's in the "superior" range, but I miss out on "genius" by a few points ;-)), and being dismissed as lazy and academically apathetic by virtually all of my teachers, that I have two specific learning disabilities. Several years later, ADHD was added to the mix.

I never had an IEP (special education plan) because my mother did not want me to be enabled. Her philosophy was that life was not going to make accommodations to my disabilities, so I might as well get used to it. Furthermore, I was pretty much about to graduate high school by the time anything would have been in place, so what was the point?

My disabilities were identified through an assessment done at Children's Hospital in Boston, and I cannot say enough good things about that experience. The staff there gave me specific ways that I could take control of both my education and my life (such as recording teacher lectures with a tape recorder, taking tests in silent locations, and so on), and I was a straight-A student my senior year of high school (good thing, too, considering the spotty transcript that preceded that year).

What I had that many students with disabilities don't is an exceptional strength that offset the weaknesses to a degree that I could function to some degree. In my case, of course, it was in the area of reading and, even more so, writing.

I could write an essay about something that I had no idea about, and my teachers would read them aloud as gold standards. I always felt a little guilty about this, but it was how things rolled.

I also have a quasi-photographic visual memory, which has probably been an even greater boon. If I see something, I will remember it with almost total recall, which is kind of a cool skill, I suppose. I am the master of the game Memory ;)

As an educator, I know that there is a label for students like I was--"twice exceptional", which basically means that I had both disabilities and areas of incredible strength.

But my intent with this post isn't to talk about my educational experiences, which would be, I suppose, kind of an interesting post in its own right and might happen one of these days.

No, it's to contemplate how my abilities, much as I know and understand them, have impacted me as an adult. This is an important discussion, I think, because schools today are actually really quick to identify students as disabled, to mass produce IEPs and 504 plans that provide what amounts to "blanket coverage" to ensure a degree of success in school but does not necessarily prepare a disabled child for real life.

I can't speak to a lot of disabilities, but I can bring up the three areas that I have personal experience with.

#1: Auditory Processing
There is absolutely nothing wrong with my hearing, per se, but I miss a lot of what I "hear" because there is a crossed wire (or something) in my brain that doesn't allow me to process what I hear.

This is one of the reasons that I avoid the telephone. It's not that I don't want to talk to people, but if there is any sort of background noise whatsoever (other people talking, the television being on, even something as simple as a fan or a car's engine), I'll more often than not let an incoming call go to voice mail.

It's kind of embarrassing to say, "What?" every time someone else talks.

I also have a tendency to avoid loud crowds of people for the same reason. I have to really struggle to follow conversations (I learned some lip reading through the staff at Children's, but I'm not great at it), and sometimes it's just not worth the trouble.

What I most enjoy, though, is that most professional development offered to teachers is of the "stand and deliver" school of thought. If I don't have something visual to follow, it's sort of like being back in history class listening as hard as I could to a lecture that went in one ear and out the other.

I am not a quiet person by any means (heh heh), but I often come off this way to people I first meet because I am very aware of my auditory processing issue and don't want to be remembered as the chick who kept saying, "What?! Say again, please? What did you say?"

#2: Spatial
Perhaps ironically when you consider my exceptional visual memory, I have virtually no spatial skills.

My mother is very into moving furniture around, for example, and she'll say, "What if we moved this coffee table there and swapped the couch and the loveseat around?" then get very frustrated when I explain that I can't visualize it.

In fact, she'll often try to draw me a map, which makes the situation even worse.

I cannot read maps. I have absolutely no sense of direction--I still get lost in my hometown, and while it qualifies as a city, it's not exactly huge. I think Mapquest, with its breakdown of how many miles you're on each road, is one of the best inventions ever.

I live on a state road that runs all the way to the beach. I once asked my mother if a certain city that was also on "Route 69" meant going east or west. She looked at me as though I was dumb and said, "Um ... what happens if you go east all the way to the end?" When I looked at her blankly, she elaborated, "You hit the ocean. If you don't want to go to the beach, you'd go the other way. That would be west." This was about six months ago.

And then, of course, there's math, which is virtually impossible if you have essentially no spatial skills. How do you explain the concept of a coefficient to someone that doesn't understand numbers? I walked into Algebra I thinking that X meant multiply.

When I took the GRE before applying for grad school, the results were almost funny. Almost. Verbal: 91st (I think ... it was ninety-something) %ile. Analytical: 75th %ile. Math: 3rd %ile. Third. That's kind of embarrassing ... but I was accepted to graduate school and maintained an A average, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

But when my students ask me to help them with math and I just look blankly at the problem, when I'm trying to calculate how many weeks away the first day of school is and I literally need a calendar in front of me to accomplish this, when I get lost on my way to the next town over ...

#3: ADHD
ADHD, perhaps the most misdiagnosed conditions in the world, is probably the condition that most identifies me as a person. Like, my ADHD is kind of a schoolwide joke at work.

Like most adults with ADHD, I
* live in a state of organized chaos. My desk at work, for example, is a landmark ... yet I have the distinction of being a teacher known for not losing student work.
* cannot sit in a meeting for extended periods of time without resorting to annoying habits like tapping my feet, moving around like I have ants in my pants, sitting backwards and sideways in chairs, shuffling papers around, and so on.
* have a fairly extensive history of impulsive, self-destructive behavior. I cannot say no to a dare, for example, because I'll be doing whatever I've been dared to do before my brain says, "Whoa, this is maybe not such a great idea" ... but I've gotten better about this.
* self-medicate (it's caffeine these days, which is far better than some past bad habits)
* need to multi-task, almost to a fault
* hyper-focus on certain things to calm myself down(I learned from a very young age to almost hypnotize myself through the act of reading)
* struggle with finishing what I've started. I have made tremendous progress in this area, but it still exists.
* am either adored (because I'm funny and endearing and goofy and all that) or the source of frustration (because I'm not always serious and am often loud and goofy and need to be reminded to get things done and such)
* am kind of a good time.

Although my disabilities have been the source of a great deal of frustration throughout my life, they are as much a part of who I am as anything else. I've reached a point where I like who I am in general, and I would not be me, the kind of person who enjoys the odd whipped cream fight and appreciates the better parts of myself all the more because of my deficiencies, if I was "normal" (which does not, in my opinion, exist anyway).

Uh ... squirrel!!!!!!!!!!!!