Time flies.....

I guess it was time to have that once in two years 'tryst with my thoughts'....:)

So many things have happened in these last one and half years. We are back in India after spending five years in the U.S., I am back to practicing medicine full time (developmental-behavioral pediatrics to be more specific), we bought our own house...and Hiya has grown up some more.

Its great to be back. Though for the first two months, I had not unpacked my bags.....I felt like taking the flight back to the U.S. We had arrived in July....Mumbai was hot and humid at that time. It was in the middle of its infamous monsoons....and I remember my chest felt as heavy as the dark clouds hanging overhead every day.

Ah.....that heaviness in my chest......that's the indication I get to tell me that things are not right, that I am nowhere near happy.

I got it again the other day...when 5 1/2 year old' Hiya read 'bog' for 'dog' for the hundred-thousandth time. I see her try to read....and I am so scared. She is reversing letters.. and numbers still. Her sight memory for words is poor too. She might decode a line , word-by-word, painstakingly...and of course, by the time she reaches the end of the line she has no clue about what the line meant. And then, if I ask her to read it again, she barely remembers some of the words and will have to decode them phonetically again.

I see her struggle...and it breaks my heart, as it breaks every day when I assess a child with learning difficulties. I remember how Hiya could spend hours earlier looking at pictures in books...but now she barely picks up a book. I get angry with her, I shout and scream and accuse her of not trying hard enough. And then I see her little face ...all anxious and teary-eyed....and I realise I have fallen into the same knee-jerk behavioral trap that I try to rescue parents out of day in and day out.

I take a deep breath and tell myself the same things that I urge parents to do. "Look at your child's strengths".

And I look around me.....and I see the little things that she makes on her own everyday. I try and remember how easy a child she is in other aspects-how beautifully she keeps her books in her book-bag, how neat her work is. And though writing for her is not easy and she is inordinately slow on it, uptil now she has a beautiful hand. I open her drawing book and look at the beautiful colors she uses. I watch her play with her dolls...and notice how organised she is in her play. Neha, at her day care often tells me how caring and nurturing she is towards some of the babies over there.

And I realise...that what they write in all those developmental-behavioral pediatrics books applies to my personal life as well. That my daughter, like any other child is a whole made up of many parts. She is sweet and creative and nurturing and friendly. She does have some difficulties on reading and writing. But she also wants to please her parents and does much better when we praise her for her strengths and reinforce what she does right. She lights up when she sees that mommy and daddy are happy or proud of what she has done...and shuts off when I scream or shout at her. Yeah.....she is 'shy'...or what we refer to as 'slow to warm up' temperamentally...and I often feel like jotting down how her temperament probably reflects in all the things that she does or does not do. Maybe, my next post will be on 'temperament'.

P.S. The other day, Hiya used the word 'confuse' for the first time-spontaneously and appropriately, and I felt my lips curve upwards. And then, yesterday she said to me"look Mommy! I can tie my own shoe-laces." As I sat beside her on the floor and watched her little fingers slowly grapple with the intricacies of tying a piece of string into a bow, I realised that neither of us had actually taught her to do so...we never had the time. It struck me then, that these were the same fingers which would curl around one of mine as she slept not so many years ago....and now they were picking up skills on their own. My baby has come a long way.....