Stories

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned something about Middle Son in an email thread at work.  The thread revolved around a problem that had come up and taken longer to resolve than seemed appropriate/reasonable.  One of my colleagues come up with a timeline showing that we had multiple pieces of information pointing to the problem, but no one was actively monitoring them.  Someone responded with a Russian folk saying--"seven babysitters have a child with one eye."

I responded by telling them about a trip I took with Middle a couple of years ago.  He and I went to visit my relatives in Austin over Thanksgiving.  I was worried about him wandering off when the adults were talking among themselves.  I made up a badge that said "I'm watching Middle" in big black letters.  The entire time we were in Austin, someone was wearing that badge.  That way there was never any question about who was keeping track of him.

Several days latter, I was talking with my colleague again about the problem.  We had made some tweaks to the notification system so that these kinds of failures would be called out specifically to the people running the project.  My colleague said that he wanted to make sure that he was watching Middle.  I startled a bit.  He said that my story had really hit home for him.

I got a kick out of that.  I told him about the talk that I'd been to, and the woman who had said sharing our stories is an important part of coping with the demands of parenting special-needs children.  And now he was sharing my story.