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Linda Davick |
allison was the slow baby.
Other children learned to roll over. She didn’t.
They learned to crawl. She still couldn’t roll
over.
Every month, I’d get together with moms from my
childbirth class. The mothers would discuss the new
skills Jesse or Lindsay or Kelly had learned. I had
nothing to say. Allison slept, ate and slept some more.
When she was awake, she was unfailingly cheerful. She
just didn’t do things.
When Allison was 9 months old, she learned to roll over.
I hurried to the moms’ group meeting to brag about
her breakthrough. When I got there, they were talking
about Jesse, who was two weeks younger. He had started
walking.
My husband and I, both Stanford graduates, had taken
it for granted that any child of ours would be at the
top of the playgroup. What was wrong?
My fears for Allison weren’t just the usual new-mom
paranoia. Her diagnoses at birth included “overwhelming
sepsis” and respiratory distress syndrome and
hyperbilirubinemia. Stanford Medical Center neonatologists
told us that if Allison survived these illnesses, she’d
probably be a normal, healthy child. But they did not
think she’d survive. Days in intensive care passed,
and she did not respond to antibiotics. “I’m
an optimist,” one doctor told us, “and I
don’t think she’s going to make it.”
Then she did. When she was well enough to get off the
respirator, the doctor called her “a minor miracle.”
All too soon I got used to her good health. Living in
over-educated Palo Alto put us at high risk for Superbaby
syndrome. We moms read baby-care books and compared
notes. T. Berry Brazelton wrote about three babies with
different development patterns—in a book meant
to assure mothers that the fast baby, the average baby
and the slow baby all represent normal variations. Allison
was slower than the slow baby. A lot slower. She didn’t
crawl until 14 months.
I thought about those days in the hospital when we prayed
just for Allison to survive. “Please, God, let
her live.” She lived. She was healthy. She was
a loving child. OK, she was slow. Accept it. Your prayer
was answered. Be grateful and shut up.
There’s this Jewish joke: a grandmother walks
on the beach with her little grandson, when a wave sweeps
the boy out to sea. The grandmother prays desperately:
“Please, God, give me back my grandson. That’s
all I ask. Return him safely to me.” A huge wave
sweeps in and deposits the grandson at her feet. She
looks at the miraculously restored boy, then raises
her eyes to the heavens and chides, “He had a
hat!”
Some months after I’d vowed to accept Allison
as she was, I picked her up at the babysitter’s
house. Deborah wore an odd expression. “You’re
going to think I’m crazy,” she said. “But
Allison knows the alphabet.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. At 21 months,
Allison could barely talk.
Deborah led me to the kitchen, where magnetic letters
adorned the refrigerator. Allison, toddling after us,
began pointing to letters and calling out their names.
Correctly.
On the way home, I stopped at the toy store and bought
magnetic letters. Standing by my fridge, I realized
Deborah had had upper-case letters. Even if Allison
knew those, she wouldn’t know the lower-case ones
I’d bought. But she did. As I stuck them on the
refrigerator, Allison called out the names: a, t, m,
g, z. She knew them all.
“I guess she’s not retarded,” my husband
said.
By 3, she was reading fluently. I ran into some preschool
parents at an Easter egg hunt. “Allison looks
great!” said a mom who had never seen her walk.
Allison glanced at a sign. “Meet the Easter Bunny,”
she announced.
“Did she read that?” the mom said. “Allison
is reading?”
I hadn’t even set this up. “Oh, yeah,”
I said. “Allison’s been reading for a while.
Yes, she turned 3 last month.”
She turned 23 this year. Early reading turned out to
be her only weird-genius trait; about other things she’s
been normal-smart. She was the last kid on the block
to learn to ride a two-wheeler. When she graduated from
college in June, she was about a year off schedule,
having taken time off to work and to study abroad.
When she walked—just as well as anyone—to
receive her Stanford diploma, I said a prayer. “Thank
you for Allison. Thanks for the hat.” |
