Gabrielle Ho­sein

Last term was Ziya's first in school and more im­por­tant­ly my first. I was com­plete­ly un­pre­pared on reg­is­tra­tion day. Had no clue. School sup­plies? Um­mm. This term, yuh girl checked off the list like I stud­ied for that gold star. Who's learn­ing now, ba­by!

There with the oth­er par­ents, I was amazed that some­how we man­age to bring up chil­dren with­out group ther­a­py ses­sions or domi­no-ef­fect dis­as­ters, the busi­ness of par­ent­ing, at once so mun­dane and been-there-done-that for the last 200,000 years, al­so seem­ing like every­day, parental A-lev­el ex­ams.

To­day, a speech and lan­guage ther­a­pist came to talk about dos and don'ts, and the im­por­tance of get­ting chil­dren test­ed. By three years old, she em­pha­sised, lisps, mis­pro­nun­ci­a­tion, lan­guage fears and even ba­by talk are no longer cute, but show po­ten­tial prob­lems that need at­ten­tion. These can re­sult in shy­ness, lack of con­fi­dence, greater con­flict and an in­abil­i­ty to be un­der­stood in your child's in­ter­ac­tions with oth­ers. All kinds of things can con­tribute, from thumb-suck­ing to bot­tle-feed­ing be­yond a year to just sheer bad habits when talk­ing to our chil­dren.

I must have been sit­ting there like the oth­er par­ents, glassy-eyed and re­view­ing the last months' mem­o­ries, to see if there were signs I missed or don'ts I was guilty of. Like most par­ents of three-year-olds, I couldn't imag­ine how any­thing could be wrong with the speech of some­one who lit­er­al­ly talks so much she once stopped her­self to com­ment on how talk­a­tive she was. When you com­ment on your own talk­a­tive­ness, you know har­ness­ing that kind of chat could give T&TEC com­pe­ti­tion.

But, I had to re­flect. Were they just words or whole sen­tences? Did I ask her yes or no ques­tions, or did I ask ques­tions that re­quired full con­ver­sa­tion an­swers? Do I re­al­ly know if she hears well in both ears? Did I re­al­ly ever pay at­ten­tion to her eye­sight?

Be­cause most par­ents are busy, tired, mul­ti-task­ing and pre­oc­cu­pied with be­ing broke, even con­sci­en­tious ones may not no­tice every­thing. Chil­dren al­so adapt and learn to com­pen­sate, mak­ing up words, point­ing, choos­ing si­lence, read­ing lips and so on. Plus, they are usu­al­ly mov­ing so much and so dizzy­ing­ly that, re­al­ly, watch­ing them is like feel­ing warm and fuzzy about a loud, over­ly ex­u­ber­ant, end­less­ly awake blur.

I love that the school tries to teach par­ents. Some may know all this stuff from rais­ing sib­lings or from hav­ing pri­or chil­dren or just from hav­ing it to­geth­er. Not me. I know about books, rivers, veg­e­tar­i­an food and rhyming. Oh, and fem­i­nism. That's my skill set. Stone knows about DJing and mu­sic. The rest is all aha mo­ments we didn't ex­pect. So, I find my­self learn­ing about par­ent­ing, school­ing, de­vel­op­men­tal stages, and both tough and ten­der love as Ziya moves through each term.

What's nice is that such learn­ing can bring par­ents to­geth­er too. I what­sapped Stone, who was home on shift with Zi, through­out the whole morn­ing par­ents' ses­sion, though I fig­ured that the prin­ci­pal prob­a­bly looked askance at my bad ex­am­ple of tex­ting through class. When I got home, Stone and I sat like two tired peo­ple as­sess­ing the steep­ness of the ter­rain ahead. We worked out how to join forces, com­pared notes and dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, and sort­ed out who would be bet­ter at what.

I feel like I cov­ered a whole syl­labus be­fore Ziya even start­ed her school term. Sur­viv­ing morn­ing traf­fic for the next term feels like just the open­ing chal­lenge in the labour and lessons of life-long learn­ing.

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