Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Jack goes to the nearby Children’s Hospital for his half hour speech therapy session. Incidentally, if you ever want to feel blue, hang out for a while at a children’s hospital. It is guaranteed to ruin your afternoon by shoving Perspective all up in your face. There’s nothing like a five year old in pink princess pjs toting an IV line and using a walker to make you appreciative of your health. Or – and this is much more difficult – appreciative of your children’s health.
Jack is far and away the most “normally functioning” child that I’ve seen in speech. In fact, I feel a smidge of guilt for putting him in speech therapy, taking a slot that could go to a needier child (I get over it. Jack has needs, even if they aren’t dire. He spent his 8 months on the waiting list.) I won’t describe the others who we see every week. I began to, but it seems a violation of their privacy, even without names, even if you readers have no possible means of identifying them.
I see the same people every week. The waiting room camaraderie is not something I anticipated, but I find that I now look forward to greeting my friends every Tuesday, asking how the week went, of both the mothers and the children. (They are all mothers, except for a couple of grandmothers.) I look at those other mothers in the room – many have been coming for years upon years upon years, one woman for over twenty years now – and I feel something complex and uncomfortable. Survivor’s guilt, I suppose – I had a baby, I had two babies, and they are whole and healthy and wonderful. That woman across from me had a baby and his needs have consumed her life. She watches her baby struggle every day. I watch my babies thrive. We both got pregnant, but she was not so lucky as I. Or rather, I was not so unlucky as her. Her baby is beautiful, of course, she loves him, of course, but for his sake I know that she wishes his life was easier.
I live week to week, and build forts in the living room with the kids and snuggle in bed and read Halloween books and practice colors and letters and numbers, and I kiss them good-bye in the morning on their way to school and give them big hugs when I get home at the end of the day, and only once a week on Tuesdays do I think about how we all walk a cliff’s edge, ready to drop over the side at any moment.