lunes, 14 de mayo de 2007

One foot in front of another

Hmmm, the great blank page, and why the urge now to blog when you have never managed more than a quarter full diary or journal in your entire life. I look at the volumes of notebooks that other people fill and wonder why when words are humming around my head all day aand I am endlessly doing bits of writing for other people why I never attend to my own. So this blog will have to serve as the answer to all that internal nagging.
Of course would love to be using this as a platform to showcase my literary efforts but frankly they aren't up to public scrutiny and the impetus came from reading India Knights blog called 'Isn't she Talking Yet?'
Readers of that blog will now instantly know that I am the parent of a 'special needs' child and rightly or wrongly assume that's what this blog is leaning toward, truthfully I'm not sure myself yet but do know I need a space to record some of the experiences of the last year or so.
So where to begin, on India Knight's blog there was lot of stuff to relate to except that she and the other parents writing on it are all in the Uk and here I am in Spain, dealing with all the same issues but in Spanish and Catalan, giving the whole thing a slightly surreal quality. It has that out of body aspect to be interviewed in a language you don't speak fluently about your childs language development issues, not so much the blind leading the blind as the language challenged representing the language delayed thus my need to write about it in my native tongue in a different place. And the title, well again those familiar with the territory may have been asked when their child began to use opposing feet to climb or descend stairs, any other parent has hopefully gotten away with a mere 'what age did they begin to walk?' I was at an interview for a place at a special needs school and was asked this question amidst many others designed to try and and shed some light on M's developmental delays. When we left the interview, to exit the building, I had to walk down two flights of stairs in front of the shrink and about halfway down realised I was frantically opposing my own feet lest I let slip some hereditary predisposition toward developmental delay. This is the kind of thing that happens to me when I spend too much time with school shrinks. Of course it could be argued that they might have a point..I sure as hell don't know what mine is but I do know that 42 year olds should not be concentrating on their oppositonal footwork. That moment at the foot of the stairs was another reason to blog.