The moment I knew my child was going to be OK...

I started this journey years ago, long before I was married and had kids. I never knew it would hit me this personally in my life as a mother.

I see it all every single day. The struggles, the frustration, and the tears from my child. The attempts to read like their peers and work three times harder than all the other kids or even their siblings, and still do not get things right. Seeing the frustration when trying to spell a word, only to erase it quickly or push the eraser into the page so hard that it makes a hole in the page. The tears they cry into their pillow because they just want to be 'normal' like everyone else.

As a mama, this broke my heart.

I knew my child was incredibly brilliant.

I knew they could solve problems in ways that I could never think of.

I knew they were working hard, yet the struggle was and is still there every single day!

I knew they would get it, but my question was always, when?

I would never give up helping them. And I would never give up on them.

As an educator, I work with children every day who face the same struggles. I see how hard they work and how much they have grown through the intervention. But I didn’t see the day-to-day struggles each parent faced until I experienced them myself.

God knew what he was doing when he created my child. He knew how their brain would think, create, and solve problems. He knew they would struggle in academic areas but would flourish in hands-on, mathematical, creative, and logical tasks.

We explain to our kids all the time that everyone has their own strengths and struggles. But sometimes that’s really hard to hear, especially when your child feels like they struggle in tasks that they have to do every single day. Reading, writing, and spelling!

Today, I write this with hope...

I see it now and have hope for my child! They have received and continue to receive support from our incredible University-Model school, are part of a successful research-based intervention, and have been given unconditional support from my husband and me. Because of this, they are thriving! Not in a ‘getting by’ kind of way, but truly thriving!

I will be honest, there were days when I didn’t know if my child would be able to read multisyllable words fluently, let alone accurately. And the other day, we were sitting there, doing our intervention, and I looked over, and my child blew me away! They were getting it. They were actually reading some difficult words and doing an amazing job! This was my child, the one who cried many tears, the one who dreaded school, the one who would lash out in frustration.

They were really doing it! They were reading!!!

Do they still misread and misspell words? Absolutely! But they are reading more than he ever has before. I knew this day would come, but I often wondered when.

I saw this happen for each of my students. I remember because I still have voicemails from parents calling me saying, “they just read the street signs as we were driving, we drove for miles, and they continued to read" or “they just read a book to their little cousin at our family gathering!”

Pure joy and excitement in the voices of these parents.

I knew there was hope. I knew we’d get there, too, but as a mama, I often wondered when.

If you are a parent of a child who is struggling in school or other areas. As you read this, may it give you hope. With the right support and time, your child will get there too.