Magical Thinking

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.