How’s your patience these days?
Patience has never been my strong suit.
I want to solve ALL the stuff yesterday.
And yet, things take the time they take whether I like it or not.
At the start of October, we noticed the younger boys struggling in reading and writing. Having seen this before in our older son, I jumped on it. I called around to schedule learning difference testing. I started scanning all their work. I introduced the possibility to them that they may learn differently (not wrong but differently) to ease their frustration. I tried, once again, to learn more and help sooner than I did the last time we went through this.
But there is definitely no quick way to diagnosis and assess for learning differences. It took 4.5 months, which I acknowledge is actually pretty good for this kind of thing. Now all the testing is finally complete. But the journey is just beginning as new strategies and interventions are being tried and more new appointments are being made.
So though I now have concrete, data-driven answers… I have no one-shot-all-is-gonna-be-golden-now solution that will make the road ahead smooth.
Because learning differences and ADHD are not problems to solve. They are a part (but not all) of my children’s story. They will involve a lifetime of strategies and interventions and understanding and self compassion and grit and drive. But these traits also contribute in no small part to the incredible way they see the world and the incredible determination and fight they have to succeed.
And oh man the tools they already have gained to navigate life has them doing it better than I did at their age!
I think this journey with all my children has profoundly changed me. In many ways, it’s given me more questions than answers. It’s given me more to explore, more to learn, more ability to recognize that I, in fact, know very little absolutely.
Below is the fuller quote from poet Rainer Maria Rilke that continues to encourage me on the journey – which also happens to be my word for 2022.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
So how’s your patience these days?
Do you think your heart has room for a little more?
