Just Another Part of the Family

By Mary Lee Gannon

"You are lucky to have a peer group built right into your family," a special education teacher told me shortly after my daughter started school.

My daughter was three and was not talking like other children her age. She had a younger brother and two older sisters with whom she couldn’t communicate well. At the time, I don’t remember feeling lucky about much of anything. But as time went on, the words of that teacher sunk in, and I drew on them for the simplest of decisions.

The first of those decisions was: Where is she going to sleep? My three daughters had been sleeping in the same room. I was about to move one of their beds into a playroom off their bedroom. I had considered moving my three year old so that I could work with her without interruptions.

Then one day I decided to rethink my motives. It was a sunny summer day and my oldest daughter dashed into my bedroom shouting, "There’s a bee in our room, Mommy!"

Two steps behind her was my three year old with a carbon-copy look on her face. "There’s a bee in our broom, Mommy!" Everyone’s beds held steady.

I call the room "the dorm." And, over time, instead of my three year old sucking her thumb and lying on her bed, she’s learned to keep pace like a trooper.

Often late at night I walk by the dorm, slipping in my usual "No jumping on the beds" comment -- to which, of course, all four of my children immediately contract selective hearing loss. I watch my youngest daughter model her siblings in a pillow fight. I smile and keep walking. The verbal ping-pong bouncing off those walls makes me wonder how I could ever have believed in shows like "The Partridge Family" and "The Brady Bunch."

My three year old is now five. Just last week I found a sign she had made taped on the dorm door. It read: Boys No! The "s" was backwards and the exclamation point was inverted, but the message got across to my son, who was lining up his army men in a take-no-prisoners formation in the hallway.

At times my older girls used to point out things their younger sister did that annoyed them. I reminded them of things they had done at her age. They’d laugh at themselves. "She’s just another part of the family," I’d tell them. For a while they just nodded and gave me that "we’ll-humour-you-Mom" grin. But, like Pavlov’s dog in Psychology 101, if you hear something enough, it begins to sink in.

What have my other children gained from watching their little sister grow? They’d probably tell you, "I don’t know." I’ll accept that answer because generally they see her as just another one of them. I’d like to believe they see people of all abilities this way.

Now I am reaping the rewards of that which I have sown. Yesterday when I asked my youngest daughter to clean up her room, she said, "You’re not in charge of the world, Mommy. I’m in charge of my own body." I had to look twice to make sure it was not a voiceover by my oldest daughter.

And I wanted this?

In my kitchen I keep a journal of funny things the children say. During the first year of my daughter’s intervention, I don’t think I wrote a thing in that book. Nothing in my life was funny. At the age of five my other children had said things like, "Mom, are the friends you had as a kid still alive?" or, "Mom, what name did you have when you were a kid?"

Presently I have two broken mattresses and a broken bed. I also have a journal in which there are entries from my youngest daughter.

"Mommy, does the sun come out of the sky or the trees?"

"The sky."

"Yeah, if it came out of the trees it would be a branch."

Her progress has come with hard effort. Her comments may not come out as quickly as the others’. But they rank in my book.

"Mommy, I don’t need to eat my crusties (crusts) because I don’t need to be strong to be a veterinarian. Mathew needs to eat his because he wants to be a fireman. He needs to be much more stronger."

Just another part of the family.

(Mary Lee Gannon is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.)

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