You Can’t Always Get (The Kid) That You Want

D and me, when I didn't know what I was getting (and when my hair was still brown)

Yesterday afternoon, as I was quietly melting away in the 90-degree heat on the edge of the soccer field, watching (well, sorta watching) my son Daniel’s practice, I started chatting with another mother, whose son was in D’s preschool class. We were just having one of those idle, “aren’t they getting so big” back-and-forth things, before we both turned back to our bottles of water/magazines/making sure our other son wasn’t putting rocks in his pockets for me to find in the bottom of the washer (me).

Now, Daniel and this other boy, I’ll call him O. because his first name starts with O (duh), were in a special-ed preschool. Neither had a specific, or lasting, “special” diagnosis. All the children in this school were either late talkers, and/or had needs for occupational or physical therapy, and/or fell somewhere on the increasingly wide autism spectrum, but with the kind of issues you can–with diligence and good services–“therapy” out of them. Now second-graders, both O. and Daniel are normal (well, normal-ish). But when they were the nearly-three-year-olds they were when we put them on that mini-bus with a backpack and extra diapers, they were not talking. At all.

Now, these are not life-altering issues, I realize that, but sometimes I forget how trying it was, for me, to have a child who wasn’t … what I had wanted. Ooh, that sounded bad, didn’t it? It’s hard to say it. And I haven’t thought about it in years, not until yesterday afternoon, when O.’s mom said to me, as she related how O. didn’t talk until he started kindergarten, “I didn’t enjoy him very much back then.”

It’s heartbreaking not to get the child that you want. These longings, these things you imagine, they are less about the child himself (he’ll be smart, he’ll be gorgeous, he’ll be a good friend to many, he’ll be a wonderful father or the person who finally cures cancer), but about you. What you imagined you’d be doing with your child when he is one, or five, or 11 or 21.

I didn’t realize how much I wasn’t enjoying the child I’d been given, until one frustrating evening when Daniel was just under 2 (he had to have been, because James wasn’t on the scene yet). My husband was away on a business trip, and I was trying to feed Daniel dinner. There was something he wanted, and his usual pointing and saying “za-dah!” (which was all he said until he finally, finally said Mama when he was three) wasn’t doing it for me. I was screaming, literally, crying, pounding on the table. Just talk to me! Talk to me!

That was when I realized that having a chatty, smart, witty little child — yes, I admit, a mini-me, the gender difference aside — was what I had been waiting for since the day I peed on that stick and saw the plus sign.

Daniel talked, eventually (and yes, as everyone flippantly told me back in the table-pounding days, it’s true that he quickly moved to talking a blue streak, to the point where I found myself wondering if he had an off button). We therapy-ed out the ticks (flipping light switches on and off, for example), and he learned to hold a pencil and relate to other children. (He’s still working on that last one; he’s been late to that particular party, but he’s there, now — he has best friends, and other friends, and while he’s always been liked, he now actually likes other kids in a more or less “normal” way.) He’s smart, sweet, loyal and kind.

And I’m still learning to enjoy the child he is, because he’s still not the child I thought I’d have. Ding! What child is the one we wanted? How can he be, since at the point we’re doing the wanting and the imagining (and, if you’re like me, actually writing mom-child scripts in your head), the child is purely theoretical, or at least embryonic.

Maybe this is a small lesson in parenting, but maybe it’s the biggest one there is: We need to love the child we get, yes (and of course we do; even on the most frustrating days, I loved this boy beyond reason), but we also need to appreciate who he is, who he really is.

Have you learned that lesson yet?