“Mama, why does your face always look so sad?”

 My older daughter started speaking at a very young age. While others babies were sitting in their high chairs babbling away, she was pointing at bananas and saying, “Mama, nana.” to let me know what she wanted to eat. By the time she was two years old, she was very aware of the world around her and able to comment on it. One time, she sat on the floor, reached around to her back and said, “I have a very beautiful spine.” I’m not sure where she had learned the word spine but she had, she knew where it was even though she couldn’t see it and, she knew how to use the word in a sentence. 

 One evening, we were sitting on the floor playing and she looked up at me with her big brown eyes and asked, “Mama, why does your face always look so sad?” I didn’t know what to answer. I had no idea that my face “always looked so sad”. Overall, I thought that I was actually rather happy. I thought that I had everything I had ever wanted—a family, a house, a little garden. Every day, her father went off to work and I took her to the park, on long walks along the river near our house and on play dates with other children. We spent mornings baking and doing crafts and late afternoons puttering together in my garden. What about all of that could possibly be making my face look so sad?

 But, one of the things that I have learned from the process of rehabilitating my youngest daughter after a childhood stroke, is the importance of not underestimating someone.  Just because a person has something that makes them different, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re less capable or don’t have a valuable contribution to make. The same can be said for young children—we may think that they are just kids, too busy playing to notice much of anything but they too can have valuable insights to contribute. 

 In this case, although I was giving my daughter all of my love and as happy a childhood as I possibly could, she was able to look at me every day, with her two years of life experience, and register that something was inconsistent with everything else that I was messaging. And, she was able to formulate a question around what she was noticing. As it turns out, she was right—deep down, there was a sadness.

 As I described in my book, I was ultimately to go through significant challenges and upheavals in my life stemming, in part, from the realization that I was in a situation that was not sustainable. I had been able to convince myself for years that I was fine, but my little two year-old daughter saw me as I actually was. 

 I've learned a lot from my daughters and in particular, I've learned that we need to be very careful not to underestimate people—young, old or different in whatever way.