Almost Thirteen

We have a running joke in our house.

When Olivia is being especially difficult or deliberately lazy or just glorying in her idiosyncracies, one of us will say, “It’s hard to have a four year old for eight years.”

She’ll laugh, things will be reset and we’ll go on with our day.

And sure, it’s funny. It lightens an otherwise stressful situation.

But it’s also true.

Chronologically, Olivia will be thirteen in just over a month. But socially, she’s about eight years old. She has no desire to attend or even host a sleep-over. She’s perfectly happy to hang with Mom and Dad on the weekends. She’s shown no real desire to wear makeup. She’s very fashionable and makes decisions about her wardrobe but she still wants help putting on some of her clothes.

She doesn’t NEED help but she wants it.

She’d much prefer to have someone spoon feed her rather than feed herself. This is exasperating, and sometimes, admittedly, infuriating.

I remember when she was a baby and not crawling when she was a year old. It was like having an infant for almost two years.

My cousin’s sweet daughter is a year older than Olivia. S is in a wheelchair and she’s still tube fed. My cousin has had an infant for almost fourteen years.

I shouldn’t be complaining about my thirteen years with a four year old.

But I am; because I can. And because you can’t actually compare O and S.

See, the thing is, I KNOW Olivia is capable of so much more than she actually does. I know she can dress herself. I know she can feed herself. I know she can bathe herself.

But…I can’t trust her to wash her own hair. I don’t know if she’s capable of changing the toilet paper roll. Those things take some serious coordination and I just don’t know if she’s got it.

I don’t know if she can stop herself from scribbling on her work at school. I want to think she can but I just don’t know.

She is physically capable of taking out an old pad and putting in new one on when she’s having her period but I don’t think she truly know when she’s supposed to do that. I’ve tried to explain it to her but it just doesn’t happen without help.

I joked the other night at a Music Boosters meeting that I only have one more year after this year because after Alyssa graduates, I won’t have a child in the music program. Olivia is not a joiner. I don’t know if she wants to be or not but I do know that she simply isn’t able to force herself to speak above a whisper while at school. There’s a block that affects her physically.

It makes me sad because I think she’s capable of so much more but her brain and body won’t work together to let her do all she could do if they would cooperate.

So we celebrate her strengths. I read her fiction, I listen to her imaginations, I laugh at her jokes and enjoy her laughter when she’s in on the joke.

We let her express herself through her fashion and exclaim in wonder when she always gets it right.

I know how lucky we are that she is who she is and she is capable of so much but I also grieve the person Olivia would have been had that fifth chromosome not had a deletion.

I know these amazing kids of mine are not done doing awesome thing. I know that this coming year, the year she is thirteen, could bring amazing achievements. I won’t stop trying to teacher her, to lead her toward growth and accomplishments. But I’ll also continue to try and celebrate exactly who she is.