So little, vulnerable, unable to grasp my thumb, no Babinski clutch. Then we knew: you were injured. Your brain impacted at birth, maybe. Or you carried a gene, like the uncle’s child we never knew about. I had prayed as a young girl that all of my children would be “normal.” Several nieces and nephews had already been born, and I said this prayer after I recited each of their names. I ask now, ‘How could that be?’ True. I had been passing on my way to school a young boy sitting at his front door with an enlarged head. Perhaps that image had precipitated that prayer.
Today you are 50 and I may be seeing you for the first time. We are still attached as one; I have been your voice for all these years. Now we converse. We talk. It is our own way of speaking and I say things to you and no one else, and you understand. Now you see me too. 08/2013