Flashback Friday

Hard as it is to believe, it has been a full year since Tad’s beloved art teacher died.

He has not forgotten her, but the grief he once felt so overwhelmingly has receded.  He now talks about her with a note of wistfulness, and often says, “She would be proud of me.”

I miss her quite a lot.  I was talking with H, Tad’s BCBA just this week, about how art classes were going.  He is doing very well in his new class, but I was hoping that he would be able to be a “helper”/volunteer in his old class.  It hasn’t worked out in the way I had hoped, and H and I have had to scale back our expectations.  But in recounting the developments with H, I sighed heavily and said, “If Teacher was still here, this wouldn’t be a problem.  She knew exactly how to handle him and would have understood what we were hoping for.”

Our last conversation was just a few days before her stroke.  She had messaged me via Facebook to tell me that she’d felt that she’d been too strict with Tad at the last art lesson.  She had called him out on some petty whining he was doing, and she felt that she had been too hard on him.  I reassured her that sometimes, he needed someone to be hard on him, and that he hadn’t mentioned being upset or anything, so whatever she had said clearly wasn’t bothering him.

“You know that I love him, right?” she messaged me.

“Yes, I do, but more importantly, HE knows you love him.” I messaged back.

I am so grateful that our last conversation contained that message.

And I am grateful that her memory is a blessing to Tad.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2018 at 12:55 am and is filed under Children, Memory Lane, Questions.
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