The Dark - Part 4

My Bear has a learning disability. We've known it for a while, we've dealt with it for awhile, but we had her retested recently and... it's... more.

I try to tell you what it is but I find myself gagging on the words, choking and gasping as I try to explain my baby Bear, my freckle face, my hazel-eyed snuggler whose long slender fingers my mother would have loved to place on the keys of a piano.

I look at the test scores and the results, the evaluations and conclusions and I shake my head, "No! No, no no!" I try to explain VSI and VSP and Processing Speed and Functional Communication and "...every day is a task for her..." and I want to throw up. I want to vomit up all the fears and anguish, the lost dreams, the broken plans. I don't want to hear, "...we see her doing very well in a funky kind of alternative adulthood..." with their cheesy hopeful smiles and their reams of paper and sharpened pencils and fine point roller-ball black ink pens.

I hear those words over and over, like a skip on a cd or the old scratch from an LP - "...every day is a task... every day is a task... every day every day every day is a task a task a task task task..."

They echo in my heart at midnight in my dreams, at 2 AM when I'm up searching for something to make me sleep deeper, at one in the afternoon as I cuddle a clients' scrawny newborn, at 5 in the evening as I cook dinner... always echoing, rebounding, bruising the walls of my mind and my heart.

I can't help it. I can't... did I do this to her? Is it MY fault? It's not like it's just one of my kids, it's two of them - my Bear and my Chick. Is it because of ME?

And of all the things that make my dark place so very very dark, it's that thought: that all of this is MY fault.