Fourteen years ago I sat in a speech therapist's office, listening to this "expert" tell me all the things that were "wrong" with my child. When I asked for a name for this disorder, delay or whatever she wanted to call it, she replied "oh, you're one of THOSE parents." Yes, I was one of those parents who always did my research. I was informed. I went to IEP meetings prepared and didn't let the "experts" do what they wanted all the time.
I didn't listen to them because it seemed they were only ever concerned with what my daughter couldn't do. They didn't seem to give a damn about what she COULD do. That day in that SLT's office, she told me how delayed my daughter's speech was, but she didn't seem to care she could count to 100(at least,) spell about that many words, work a computer, do puzzles, write and draw well beyond what her pre-school classmates could do. All she cared about was that she couldn't get her words out.
My daughter had lots of words. She could say lots of words. Her problem was with putting them together. She definitely wasn't "non-verbal." That's what her reports said though...
As the years went by, I fought. I fought hard for her because I saw the things she could do. This was a child who knew her entire alphabet--out of order--before the age of two. She grasped the mathematical concepts of carrying and borrowing at the age of 4. Her first day of first grade, she came home and wrote down a list of the kids in her class. I was shocked the next day when I went in to volunteer and saw her list matched the list hanging on the wall. She seemed to have a photographic memory.
The next year, her teacher decided that she must be autistic because(ha) she wouldn't HUG her teacher and because she chewed on her pencil erasers. I knew she was crazy. I knew she didn't hug her because she didn't like the teacher and she chewed the erasers because she was stressed at school. You would be too if your teacher seemed to not like you and made you nervous! I packed her up and took her to Vanderbilt University to find out for sure.
Vanderbilt was where some research was going on about Late Talking Children and my daughter fit all the traits of this group of kids. She was smart, loved math and music and had a great memory. Unfortunately, even a report from these true experts was not enough to get that second grade teacher to lay off my daughter. She decided the way to "help her" was to take her out of her reading group and put her in the group with the kids who "couldn't read." Yes, those were my daughter's words. When she came home in tears, I pulled her from school and homeschooled her the rest of that year.
I could write a book on our experiences in the public school system, but I'll stop. We moved when she was in 8th grade and her experiences in that school system were amazing. We moved again as she started high school and she had no accommodations. She took honors classes, advanced math and even an AP class through her high school years.
This past weekend, she graduated from high school with honors. The fourteen years we fought for her were all worth it. She reached her potential and she excelled in ways that amazed me. It truly scares me to think how things would have ended up if we hadn't fought throughout those early years. No, I'm not saying I'm some fantastic mother. I did what any mom hopefully would have done, but so often I see parents afraid to trust their intuition. I trusted mine, thankfully!
This fall she'll be going off to college and while yes, her disability is still there, she IS the person I always said she was: smart, beautiful, talented and amazing!
Time flies...even when you feel like the hours are creeping along. One minute they look like this...
The next, they're doing this:
So take that Ms. Baker and all the others who had the nerve to doubt her potential. You WERE wrong. Look at her now. She's a math major and is already planning to get a master's in meteorology. I have absolutely no doubt that she'll achieve everything she says she will!
