How My Daughter’s Greatest Challenge Became a Gift

How My Daughter’s Greatest Challenge Became a Gift

My firstborn didn’t smile for months after she was born. She didn’t laugh or interact. But she was very aware of her environment—watching, with somber brown eyes, everyone who crossed her path.

Because of this visual and auditory stimulation, she cried often. Especially from five to seven p.m. and then on and off throughout the night. It was the hardest season of my life, and that’s taking into account this past year.

I remember, after her first birthday, getting down on all fours and trying to teach her to crawl. I remember crying in the pediatrician’s office after I couldn’t say yes to any of the milestones she should have reached by then.

I berated myself: I shouldn’t have given in to an epidural. I shouldn’t have used the microwave to warm her baby food. I should have played with her more as an infant instead of letting her cluster nurse and nap on my lap as I ironically wrote The Midwife: a novel about motherhood.

I had failed her. I was a failure.

Almost three years later, this sense of failure does not often rear its ugly head, but riding in the car with my husband on the way to our grocery store date, it did.

I’m not sure if it was the shift in my daughter’s schedule and diet, my husband spending a lot of time hunting in the woods, or just the fact that my mother was visiting from Tennessee so my daughter felt it was prime time to exhibit her worst behavior, but I was appalled by what I saw: she lashed out at her little sister; she was disrespectful to me and my mother, needed snuggled around the clock, and sucked her hand constantly—strings of saliva dangling from her fingers.

“Will she be okay?” I asked my husband in the car, tears coating my voice.

He nodded, staring at the twin high beams illuminating the road. “She will.”

I have asked that question countless times since I became a mother, and I know there’s a question hidden inside the quotation marks: “Will I do right by her?”

A few months ago, I was having a quiet but intense discussion with one of my friends in the kitchen. My daughter was in the play room with her cousins. Suddenly, she came running out, crying, and needed held. I asked her cousins if anything had happened. It had not. I then realized that my daughter had sensed the subtlest shift in my tone and needed comfort.

This past week, at a family gathering, we sang “How Great Thou Art.” My daughter darted out of the living room, frantically looking for me. I waved to her. She came over and leaned against my legs. I rubbed her back in circles as I sang. But regardless of this reassurance, I could feel how her body shuddered. We hadn’t reached the chorus when she began to sob and needed held.

And then I read an article, “Highly sensitive people: a condition rarely understood,” posted by an author friend that not only helped me understand my daughter, but helped me understand myself:

“‘Being [a Highly Sensitive Person] is genetic,’ says Dr Elaine Aron, who is a leading researcher in the field. ‘Twenty percent of us are born with it and it affects both sexes equally. I explain the condition in four letters: DOES. D is for depth of processing, which is the key to the whole condition. They process everything around them very deeply. O is for overstimulation, which is brought about because of D. E is for emotional reactivity and empathy. Research shows HSPs respond more to the emotions of others and to situations in general. And S is for sensitive stimuli – they’re incredibly sensitive to smells, sounds and light. However, not all HSPs are alike. For example, we know that around 30% are extroverts rather than introverts, which is what most people expect them to be.’”

I suddenly understood that the depth of emotion my daughter felt while listening to music or hearing a shift in tone was the same depth of emotion I felt throughout my own childhood. Over the years, however, I have learned to cope with these emotions through reading, writing (as I’m doing now), or taking long walks to assimilate my experiences.

It brought so much comfort to know that I could not only connect with my daughter, but that I could understand her triggers and emotions because we are both highly sensitive to our environments.

The morning after I asked my husband if our firstborn daughter would be all right, she awoke early and came over to our bed. I scooped her up and cuddled her—the way she likes to begin each day; the way I also like to begin mine.

“I’m going downstairs,” I whispered. “Do you want to sleep some more or go with me?”

“Go downstairs.”

So I carried her downstairs in the dark. I set her down, and she walked across the kitchen in her purple polar bear pajamas with the feet. She looked through the window, her button nose pressed against the glass. “Look at the sunset, Mama,” she whispered into the morning.

I came over and stood beside her.

“See that?” she whispered. “There’s a nest.” I looked at the bare branches of an oak tree where she was pointing and saw the tangle of twigs and leaves.

Tears stung my eyes, as I saw my daughter’s sensitivity to her environment not as a handicap she would have to overcome, but as a gift.

Maybe she will even become a writer.

Have you ever had a handicap that turned into a gift?