I’m always amazed at how far we’ve come when the looking back pictures come up in my Timehop App or in the On This Day feed in faceBook. Regardless of the emotion that is brought up from the photos of yesteryear, I am always amazed. That’s the perfect word. Amazed. Amazed at how far we’ve come. Amazed at what we’ve overcome. (Amazed that I’m still alive.) But most importantly, I’m always amazed at where we are today.
Take today’s #throwbackThursday #tbt post on our EmesArmy Facebook page…
(A barefoot little girl in purple glasses is holding black cards & gazing at the 2 inch white letters on the cards. She is arranging the cards on a brown kid sized table & bench in 2 rows of alphabetic order – lowercase & uppercase.)
That’s our #littleblindgirl in March of 2010. I checked the math with her this morning – she said she was 3. I believe her. The conversation went just like this:
“Eme, how old were you in March of 2010?”
“Well, I would have been zero in August of 2006 because that’s when I was born. 1 in August of 2007; 2 in August of 2008; 3 in August of 2009 and 4 in August of 2010.”
I fully expected her to say 4. After all, she is 9 years old & birthdates & months can be hard for adults – like me… But no way man… She matter-of-factly said, “I would have been 3.”
In March of 2010 when this picture was taken, our little Eme was 3 years old. I had NO IDEA what her future held. What my future held. I was living in a fog. It was a really hard time that I don’t like to think about. I was in & out of medical & specialist appointments with my little Eme every other day. I was trying to get my head around the words “cognitive delay”. What in the hell did that mean?
I am a mother of 5 with a masters degree in public health. I knew damn well what the words meant, but when I heard those words used over & over to describe my little Eme, I simply did not hear them. My brain couldn’t figure out what they meant. It couldn’t compute. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t hear them.
“Retarded?” “Unable to learn?” “Slow learner?” “Brain not working?” None of the words or phrases I heard doctors & professionals say over & over connected to “my” reality. This couldn’t possibly be happening to me. My oldest 2 kids were straight A students. Honor students. My genes were good. You know the thoughts…
It was VERY hard to process that my 3 year old could say her ABCs like a champ; but she couldn’t identify any letters when I would show them to her over & over. (Ok, it was really over & over & over & over. I was a little incessant.) Sometimes she was right. Just enough to tease me and make me think she was learning them. Actually it was more like, “just enough to make me hope she was learning them.”
I showed her letters on her sisters’ flash cards. When she would get one right, I would praise her (and say my internal hallelujahs) & excitedly mark the date on the back of the card. After all, she was my youngest & last child – it was ok to write on the flash cards! We were proving everybody wrong & the cards & charts I made were my proof. My data. But my data pointed to Eme not learning her letters.
My little cutie was everything but consistent. It made me crazy. It seemed like she just couldn’t learn the letters. I struggled with thoughts that I must be expecting too much. …that I must be pushing too hard. I convinced myself that I needed to accept that kids developed differently. I scoured over developmental charts & charted what she COULD do. I dug out baby books & hospital & check-up records from 1995 – 2006. Eme was #5. I was really close to having a statistically significant sample size… (That’s a nerdy science joke. But it’s how I was trying to make sense of things that weren’t making sense.)
When those results were not comforting, I convinced myself that I should listen to the specialists & that I shouldn’t compare her to my other children. After all, she was born much smaller than everyone else. She was tiny in comparison to the four siblings before her. Unlike her siblings, “stout” and “healthy” we’re not words used to describe little Eme. As a matter of fact, when her big blue eyes appeared to vibrate & bounce back and forth when she was a baby, we were told that it was likely “just taking the muscles in her eyes longer to develop & tighten up.” (Nystagmus is what it’s called.)
It was a long hard road to this specific day in March of 2010. On this very day, six years ago, I stood in my kitchen marveling at my 3 year old daughter as she unscrambled & put 2 sets of the alphabet in linear order. I wept as I watched her tiny little fingers graze the textured sandy surface of each card. She didn’t really “trace” each letter, but she was clearly “feeling” their shape.
My little Eme was not “cognitively delayed”; she was going blind. She simply couldn’t see. She couldn’t see the things I used to teach her. She couldn’t see the things I used to quiz her. But she could feel these letters on these cards.
When I asked her to identify things, I was doing it based on sight. That is all I knew.
Today, as I look at this picture, all I can think is “WOW.” One word. Wow.
“We’ve come a long way baby” seems to be an understatement. How fitting that we’ve been celebrating #InternationalWomensDay this week. I have zero doubts that my little girl that happens to be blind is going to #changetheworld. She just needs the right tools. I now know that. I didn’t know that in 2010.
I never dreamed she’d be a straight A honor roll student. I never dreamed she’d qualify for gifted & talented. Honestly, at that point, standing in my kitchen in 2010, I didn’t even know she could go to public school. Every single dream we started her life with as parents had been chipped away by every medical appointment over the course of 3 years. At one point, we didn’t know if she’d live to be 3… But that’s another story…
The unbelievably huge epiphany that changed Eme’s life & my life started on this day in March of 2010, just six very long short years ago. On this day, I was taught that she was not “cognitively delayed” or “cognitively impaired”. She likely didn’t have brain lesions or a deteriorating ability to learn. She was just blind. That’s it. Just blind.
THAT I can deal with. THAT computes.
You can follow Eme’s journey #GrowingUpBlind through our EmesArmy website. We’ll be sharing more through our blogs & social media accounts. Follow us on Twitter @EmesArmy & Instagram for all of #EmesAdventures! (And she has some doozies!)
You’re welcome to connect with me, her mom on Twitter or by commenting below.
✌🏻️💙😎 Tabby Mitchell
Growing Up Blind 