So Many Faces In and Out of My Life

Went to a new tutoring appointment today and when I walked in the mother said, "I know you." She didn't look that familiar to me, but I've gotten slightly used to that from my days as a PTA muckety muck (I'm big in this town, I tell you). But then she knew exactly where she knew me from, and it turns out she was the speech therapist from when Prima was in Early Intervention, a good seven years ago. I'd liked her at the time. What I'd really liked was that after evaluating Prima for a little bit, she said, "She is very, very, very bright"--I can still hear exactly how she said this, and how relieved I was--thus beginning Prima's long career of impressing speech therapists and doctors but not school professionals (the SEIT who worked with her had her testing in the low normal range, e.g., and told me all the very many things Prima wasn't doing that she should be doing, like alternating feet and jumping off curbs and saying how old she was).

And in meeting the son, I suddenly got a whole biography on the mother, because the son had major dysfluency, and I could imagine the parent first dealing with the child's dysfluency and studying everything she could possibly find out about dysfluency and then eventually turning it into a career. One of the many, many times I'm reminded of how our children take us places we'd never expected to go.

I'd had no idea. Really, before I'd had children, I'd had no idea.

Seven years. It still feels like yesterday. And I was able to pull out pictures--look! That's the little baby you remember, who now weighs 80 pounds! And Prima's getting a little resource room but doing so well, the child you last saw when she was in diapers.