Dear Kids,

When I was five, just about a month before my sixth birthday, I broke.

It was the Friday before Easter, and my grandmother Millie was visiting. We were sitting on the old wooden steps in front of my childhood home. Cars were muddling past the house going wherever it was that they were going. My grandma and I were playing a game that we had played many times before. We were guessing the color of the car that would come by next. I loved this game. It made me feel smart, because I picked the most common colors for cars and was almost always right. My grandma always guessed that there would be a purple, pink or orange car. Oddly she was seldom right. We were laughing.

The cars kept getting louder and louder until each car practically shook my head with its noise.

My grandmother brought me inside.

The next day things were quiet again.

And on Easter Sunday I woke up completely unable to hear.

I thought that everyone was playing a practical joke on me at first, so I wasn’t too worried. Then I realized that I couldn’t hear the birds. I still wasn’t too worried. I was blissfully naive and could not overhear the conversations going on around me. I figured it was like the times that I had gotten water in my ears, I guess.

I’m told that this sort of thing is every parent’s worst nightmare. A “normal” child that becomes “broken”.

I wasn’t broken. I jokingly say that I am now, but the truth is that I was exactly the same, just frustrated by the fact that no one saw me that way. It was like being put inside of a box. Everyone was sorry. Everyone was unsure how to act. I was suddenly different, even as I felt the same. As I was struggling to regain my footing everyone was trying to help me sit back down.  We were out of sync, and everyone was trying to take the lead when they should have been stepping back to see where I would go. Sometimes the best way to help a child is to hold your confidence in them until you see that they are faltering. See what they can do before you step in and take over.

I could not understand anything other than that I was broken somehow and that everyone was trying to fix me. Too many wires, too many tests, too many doctors, too many people that didn’t know what they were doing but that were somehow supposed to make me whole again. It was not “Let’s see what happened and gather information.” It was “You broke, we need to fix you.”

None of it worked. This new silence was a permanent thing. My body had ideas of its own.

I was fine with that. The things that they tried to do to restore sound to my life were simply ugly. Garish. Blaring. Muddled. Squealing. The first time I heard birdsong after getting a pair of hearing aids was the last time I wore those hearing aids.

Silence was just fine with me. I was already learning how to lipread. Children adapt. They absorb. They grow rapidly. They overcome. They are the ones inside of their bodies who understand what has and has not changed for them.

Everyone had their ideas about what I could and could not do. What I should be able to understand, what I should be able to achieve.

I fought expectations. There were things that I struggled with that should have come easy according to everyone else. There were things that I did perfectly which everyone thought I would struggle with. I was stuck in a situation of constantly being told that it was okay if I couldn’t do the things that I could do, while simultaneously being told that if I couldn’t do the things that I couldn’t do, I was not trying hard enough.

I learned that everyone sees a child as a liar. Someone trying to escape responsibility somehow, but full of foolish dreams about what they can do and silly ideas about who they are. This has carried forwards into adulthood and I’ve learned to cope. The truth is that there is not much that you can do other than suck it up sometimes.

It makes me sad and upset those times where I struggle or those times where I have to just go ahead and do those things that everyone questions my ability to do.

As a mother, though, I’m grateful for the lessons I have learned through being ‘broken’.

I do not dismiss my children as liars, even if what you speak is not the truth as I know it to be. Instead I try to understand what it is that you mean, why you might be lying. And I try to help you understand that “I don’t want to” is not the same as “I can’t” or “it’s hard”.

I do not view a situation that you are in as “you”.

I do not fancy my parenthood as a requirement to “fix” you,  rather it is a requirement to love you and to help you find the tools and things that work for you in whatever situation you are in. (“Broken” or not.)

I have learned that I cannot feel your losses more than you do. When I take what you are feeling and run with it as my own, I am not being fair to you. When you fall and scrape your knees, I let you feel your upset without either amplifying it with my own or dismissing it by encouraging you not to cry. I can be the simple provider of comfort as you seek your context for your experiences. Sympathy does not mean that I need to feel your scraped knee more than you do. It means that I need to be there for you as you process your ouch and learn its magnitude through the experiences of your life.

Being “broken” has given me the gift of seeing every child as being beautifully whole, just in different ways and with different toolsets available to them. Even if someone is “broken” they still have things that they can do better than most people who are “normal”. And even among “normal” people there are talents and shortcomings.

I understand now that I didn’t change, my life did. My loss of hearing was not something for anyone other than myself to mourn. And I learned that with my own children I need to love them for who they are, not for who they could have been or should have been if something about them was somehow different.

I am grateful for this, as it allows me to see you as who you are, not as who I want you to be. I see other parents struggling to form a child to what they imagined. I see you as someone who surpasses my capacity for imagination, and delight at your expressions of self.

If you ever “break” I’ll help you look for the tools that work for you, rather than the things that “fix” you for me.

I understand that you are too complex, too different from me, too uniquely yourself for me to be able to create you in my imagination. So instead I’ll sit back and see who you become. I’ve got faith in your abilities and your awesomeness. I know better than to mourn something that I think you should have been when you’re so busy being all that you are.

I don’t want the child that I imagined. I want the child that you are.

❤ Mama