We struggle on with Graham and his essays. Sometimes it feels like WWI, we have to fight so hard to make the tiniest, most incremental improvements. I think we vastly underestimated how different this writing was from anything he had ever done. Far from being the rules-based expository writing that is being drilled into him in college, the college essay is half confession/diary, half marketing. Kids are asked to show some leg and demonstrate who they are, in their core, while also puffing themselves up, in a sense. "Why I am deep." This is not easy for anyone, but certainly not for a kid on the spectrum.
Which made me wonder about how miraculous it was that Natalie just cranked this stuff out and presented it to us more or less done. Sure, we read her essays and gave minor feedback, but it was mostly grammar, small points of presentation. I was thinking about that earlier, and Mary said that somewhere in there Natalie had somewhat resentfully said something about how she had needed to do it all herself.
Which made me feel bad. Again, from a very young age the dynamic was that Natalie had all the attention until Graham was born, she was the golden-curled wonder child, then he came and all of a sudden attention shifted to him not because he was a baby, but because he had higher demands. First the food allergy, then the speech delays and eventually the autism.
She had to become more self-sufficient. It has served her well, but at what cost?
I feel a little guilty about it, but I do know that we have never not tried to give attention to both of them.
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