Like water through a fine mesh sieve all the things which the assessment does not capture
- Our boy is learning to connect words and sounds to things. Behind is his favorite preposition. He uses it to link any two related ideas: we’re tired behind our busy day, behind our big hike.
- I like jargon. Knowing the names for things. I’m here to see Jessica for the PCIT study. It makes me feel like I know things.
- When we see a person he recognizes, our boy will shout: I know you! Leaving the psychology lab we see one of the research assistants leaving campus on a Vespa. Her flowered dress. She looks like a girl on a postcard. He rolls down his window. There you are!
- With children, euphemisms are unacceptable. At school a teacher sprinkles powder on the rug. What happen?! He exclaims everything. Oh, a little….accident. Someone peed on the rug? Not exactly. Well what happened? He repeated. Well, you know when you get a little tummyache in the car? He looks at me pointedly, as if to say, Mom, translate. Someone threw up on the rug, I say. Oh, ok. Now every morning he reminds me: someone threw up there.
- When we take him for a speech evaluation, he doesn’t qualify. His speech is emergent. He says them some of the time, the sounds. His hand darts out to tap the cards before she finishes asking her questions. Touch the girl holding a ball. Touch the dog that’s in front of the boy.
- The questions are designed to test receptive language. Does the child understand prepositions, colors, gender; concepts like night and day?
- He calls nighttime the darkness. When we went to open house at his school, he called it open school house at the darkness.
- The difference between play therapy and the rest of the world is that you have to use the right names.
- People won’t know what you mean if you call a gray cloud brown. We have to all use the same names for things, so I can know what’s in your head.
- I will never know what’s in his head. He screams in the night and I cannot comfort him.
- I take him to the science museum but he seems to have confused a museum with a zoo and when he realizes there are no monkeys there (monkeys what got the honks) he doesn’t want to get out of the car. His face crumples silently. Really, he asks for so little. I can’t take him to the zoo, though, because it’s supposed to rain. The sky is luminous, satin gray and the sun shifts wildly far, far beyond it. We go to the art museum instead, and the fountain in front is full of dead frogs.
- What’s the biggest number, he asks one day. Numbers just keep going forever, I say, there’s no biggest number. The next day he asks: the numbers are still going?
- No mom, that’s not right. I read a book about that.
