There is a fear that lives quietly in every mother of a special child. It does not announce itself. It waits in the gap between one appointment and the next, in the pause after a stranger asks a well-meaning question.
“Give the child to me,” they say — teachers, relatives, sometimes even other parents. As if love could be handed across a table. As if the years of learning your own child’s language could be transferred in an afternoon.
What I have learned, slowly, is that the answer is not to hold tighter. It is to build a circle wide enough that the question stops being frightening — a school, a therapist, a community who see what you see.
