How hard work from this child who was diagnosed as slow-to-develop helped him overcome, and become, translated…
When An-An was two, he still couldn’t walk yet, and after we took him to the neurologists, the doctor told us he might be developmentally delayed. But just to be sure, the doctor wanted to do a CT scan to be more thorough, if it’s confirmed, they will, document it on his birth certificate.
But my wife decided to NOT put our child through it, said why would we want our son to be labeled as “developmentally delayed”? On the way home, we walked across the ice cream stands, and, allowed our son to have the very first ice cream in his life, and as my wife ate with my son, she’d told him, “After you’d had your ice cream, you need to learn to walk, so you can, walk alongside mommy, okay?”, but I could tell, she was, worried about, the futures for all of us.
As An-An started school, it was, the start, of our nightmares. Once when my wife went to pick our son up from kindergarten early, she’d found that the other children barred my son from getting on the slides with them, said he was too slow to climb up. And An-An was, very knowing too, and waited and watched as the other children played, until the teacher called the class in, then, he’d, hurriedly, climbed up the slides, and, slid down once, then, he’d, walked back into the classroom, satisfactorily. My wife’s heart broke as she watched him from outside the walls.
illustration from UDN.com…
In the academia, as parents, we don’t ask anything of him, and when he’d, occasionally scored a 60, my wife would, hug him excitedly and told him, “An-An is so amazing, you can teach mommy now!”, and, An-An believed himself to be a genius in his home. And, this sort of an encouragements actually, proved to be helpful to his learning in the future, he’d, believed, that if he didn’t learn the material in school well enough, he would be, trying his mom hard.
In the third grade, An-An wanted to learn the saxophone, we’d not given him any encouragements on it, but, we’d not wanted to, rain on his parade. Later, the teacher said, that there’s not that many trombone players, asked him if he wanted to play that? And, we weren’t sure, if this was a good idea for An-An, but, he’d, cherished the encouragement from his teacher. He’d never missed a band practice, in the fifth grade, his music teacher even assigned him a solo segment, and, as his homeroom instructor watched him perform, she’d, selected him to be the model student, we knew that this was the encouragement from his teacher, but we’d worried, that it might give An-An the impressions, that his life will be, smoothsailing from here on out.
As he’d done, taking the middle school exams, my wife and I, didn’t even want to go check his grades, to see how he’d done, and, as the grades were sent to us, his total score was at the acceptance grade of the number one all-male high school, he’d still told us plainly, that the test questions weren’t so hard, that having a 34.8 percentile still wouldn’t guarantee his getting into his first-choice of high school. My wife was already crying, said to him, “You really didn’t need to work so hard, we just want you to grow up happy!”
And, I’d, finally understood, that in An-An’s life, he’d been tried in his learning processes, that he’s, so fearless, taking on all the challenges, because of the support he has from his mom!
And so, this is the amazing tale, of how an originally developmentally delayed child became, outstanding, not just because he’d, worked hard in his academia, but because he has a supportive parent that was his backup, and I’m sure, that this young man, will go on, to achieve any and all of the dreams he will have in his bright future too!