Stay just a little bit longer

When Dakota came to live with us he was 3 and I was 43. That was 6 years ago-if you do the math the answer is now he's 9 and I'm... tired all the time. We knew he had what they then referred to as "developmental delays". Though I scratched my head and wondered if the person who comes up with these names is a traffic reporter, I figured I understood what it meant: He would be a little later in potty training; he would start kindergarten a year or two past the other kids; maybe even that (God willing) puberty would be delayed, thus pushing it past when I would enter menopause so one of us wouldn't have to die from that dangerous combination. As time went on I began to realize "developmental delay" meant only that they didn't have a category for the havoc and wreckage his biological mother's prenatal drinking and drugs left behind in this fragile little boy's brain. It was a clinical way of saying 'we have no idea what you should expect'- which in the end, I believe, is true for whatever they call the affliction a child with special needs has. There is no word or description to convey that this means years of constant working on the basics of life like dressing and eating, plus the extra work to learn the alphabet or colors or where you live. Dakota can tell you he lives in Oklahoma but not his address or birthday or spell my name. I cannot tell you how hard it was to let him go somewhere with others knowing he could not tell someone who he was or where he lived. He knows my phone number now and if he goes slowly he can spell his last name, so my anxiety is much less. We just try to make a game of repeating our address hoping someday it will click and fearing it never will. No one can tell us how far Dakota will ever progress, so every time he learns something new we wonder if this is as far as he will ever get. Will he have the mental capacity of a 5 year old forever or will he make it to 12 or 15 or 20? One thing's for sure: Dakota is going to be at home a long time...and we'll be there for him always.