More coffee please.
You know what I would love? I would love to be able to write about other stuff. By other stuff, I mean politics, or fashion ( please, maintain your laughter) or anything news worthy. Instead of that, I dwell on things like children and how they’re unable to see.
I think about how Aidan can ask me where to find her red sweater, and then not see it when I tell her where it is.
“Mommy, I need my red sweater.”
“It’s hanging on the back of your closet door.”
“I can’t see it.”
“That’s because you’re standing in the kitchen. Go to your room. Open your closet door. Look on the hooks that are hanging on your closet door. Reach up. Grasp sweater with your right hand.”
“OK.” She says, in an upbeat, kind of sounds like my mother, voice. Then, she walks into her room, and who knows what happens. Maybe she thinks her closet is Zoe’s closet. Maybe she thinks I said the bathroom the closet. Maybe, she has been abducted by aliens. But whatever happens when she goes into her room, it’s nothing I told her to do.”
“Mommy, I still didn’t see it.”
I walk into her room. Open the closet door. Look on the hooks that are hanging on her closet door. Reach up. Grasp the sweater with my right hand. At this point I want to scream, because it’s 7:00am and this is 15th thing I’ve had to locate. Then she says….
“Oh! I didn’t see that there. I guess my eyes were playing tricks on me.”
Children are blind. Also, they don’t hear very well. They’re practically deaf. Sometimes I think about Helen Keller and how she really isn’t that different from every other child. The only difference is that she had a caretaker who actually figured out how to communicate with her. Maybe next time, I will write all my instructions on the palm of Aidan’s hand.
