When it isn’t a quick fix

I took my daughter to get her ears checked at the audiologist recently. She has a long history of developmental delays globally, and her speech is many years behind where it should be. We’ve worked and worked through speech therapy and tutors and any intervention we can get our hands on for nearly three years. Though we’d been told by foster care workers she’d had a hearing exam before, we also have been told lots of things like that which have turned out to not be true. So we wanted to look into this again just to make sure hearing wasn’t affecting her slow progress in speech and language development.

And honestly, this is terrible. But I found myself wishing there was something wrong with her ears.

If there was a simple structural issue, there would be a clear reason why she was struggling. A surgical procedure could be the quick solution to set her off on a straighter path to success and catch her up to peers. I knew that if her ears were perfectly fine, then it would simply be years and years longer of intensive therapy and questioning ourselves in whether or not we’re doing every possible thing for her to succeed in life. In a season where everything seemed to be an uphill battle—academics, mealtimes, playtimes, relationships, conversations—I just wanted a quick fix.

It’s so hard to not compare to our other kids who are younger and quickly catching up and surpassing her skills. It’s a challenge to not expect her to be at the same level as her classmates.

But we have to remind ourselves to look back at what she has done and overcome, and continue to nurture those sometimes small ways she has grown over the past few years. We can only compare her to herself, and thankfully phones and their video and picture-taking ability have been great for that. I daily have to check my expectations and remember to be grateful that we’re further along than we were, and try to give less weight to those feelings of knowing that we’re still not where we’d like to be. Because I can keep playing that game for her entire life and never actually stop to be present with and thankful for her now—exactly as she is.

I can be thankful that I can take her to the store with me now and she is actually a help instead of wildly running through aisles grabbing things as a newly-placed foster child. I can find rest in the fact that she’ll let me go to the bathroom by myself without freaking out. I can be grateful that she has friends her age who want to be friends with her in return. These are all things I’d never dreamed possible a few years ago. And they’re very low standards of success for anyone else. But they’re big for her.

I don’t want to settle into complacency and quit trying to give her every possible opportunity to succeed. But I do find that as I’m trying so hard to “leave no stone unturned” when it comes to medical or therapeutic avenues, I can easily and unconsciously fall into the belief that there’s something out there that might “fix” her. It really is a balancing act of advocacy and thankfulness for the present moment.

Her ears were completely fine. This is a long-haul kind of thing, and we’ll probably be working on it for a lifetime to help her live the richest life possible. But having a child with a disability, I find that you really need to do far more work on yourself than you ever will on your child. It’s a continual practice of patience and intentionality and reframing what happiness and success look like. I’m not very good at it.

Whether it’s managing expectations, repeating simple concepts what seems like a hundred times while managing to keep your cool, quitting the comparison game, and continuing to be an advocate, my attitude in all of it can so easily move from the relationship to the end result. Even the care that I try and fight to get her in a system that fails her and so many—I have to check in with my own unspoken beliefs that there will be a silver bullet kind of solution that will make life perfect and easy for her and us as a family.

Today I try to approach my relationship with her with gratitude-colored glasses as I try to learn a little more about how to make peace with the long-haul.