When my son was born, he was a bit premature, small in size, but healthy and strong. It wasn’t until he was about 7
months old, and had made no efforts to try to crawl, that we learned something was wrong with him.

It wasn’t something very major, just one of those little idiosyncrasies that made, and still make, my son the special
person he is.

When my daughter was six years old, she was diagnosed with congenital dislocated hip. The hip bone wasn’t
connected to the leg bone, like the song says it’s supposed to be. Instead, the ball of the leg bone had been growing outside of the hip socket for six years, until, finally, it had grown enough that the bone was beginning to protrude.

When she was seven years old, she had to have surgery to repair this condition, and today, except for a slight limp and some arthritis in the hip joint, she hardly remembers anything was ever wrong.

I was pregnant with my son when she was diagnosed, and when my daughter had her last surgery, my son was seven months old. During the course of her rehab, they also wanted to look at my son, since this disorder was indeed  genetic. It was discovered that my son was born with the same connective tissue disorder that caused the problems in my daughter, only worse.

We used to marvel at how flexible my son was. To this day, his shoulders and fingers can bend all the way backward, without pain, and his thumb rotates at a full 360 degrees. It’s painful for me to watch, but my son swears it doesn’t hurt. Now, I’m no medical doctor, and this condition really doesn’t cause any major problems for my son, but the way I understand it is that the connective tissue between the joints and such in my son’s body is less dense, and therefore, weaker, than that of an average person’s. This means two things.

First, my son is much more pliable, bendable and flexible than the average kid, and secondly, it means his muscles
themselves have to be a bit stronger in order to support a weakened frame.

Well, that explained why my son did not actually crawl until he was almost a year old, and did not take his first stumbling steps until he was almost a year and 1/2 old.

Today, my son is a healthy and energetic young man with no residual problems from his connective tissue disorder except for freaking his mother out by laughing and pulling his fingers backward and making me shiver.

The lesson to be learned here is that, when there is something that happens to you that makes one part of your
life weak, it doesn’t mean you have to falter or fail. It simply means that other parts of your life will just have to be a little stronger or you will just have to proceed a little slower than you might have originally planned.

Yet, it gets even better. Because my son was unable to develop his gross motor skills as quickly, he was actually
talking as early as seven months old and he was making one to three word sentences by the time he was a year old. This is way ahead of the curve for language skills. His doctor said  it was not surprising, because, after all, not being able to crawl or walk, my son had nothing to do but to learn how to talk.

To this day, it’s a skill he possesses, and boy does he like to utilize his talking skills, loudly, frequently.

It brings up another good point to consider, however. If you find that there is a weak point in your life, something that
needs more support and time than other areas, you might very well find that, not in spite of this weakness, but indeed, because of it, that you have strengths in other areas you didn’t even realize!

By the time my son was two years old, he was completely caught up on his gross motor skills for any normal two year old, but he retained an advance level of language skills. He speaks well for his age now, has a huge vocabulary, and he can read like nobody’s business.

A weakness can indeed be a strength, if you let it. I remember one night when I was cooking dinner and my son was sitting on the floor below me playing with some alphabet blocks. I’m sure you’ve seen the kind: wooden
blocks with painted letters and numbers on them?

He kept trying to stack the blocks to make a tower, but once  the blocks were about three high, the ‘tower’ would come tumbling down.

My first reaction was to help him, but something inside of me told me not to bother him. You would have to have seen him staring so intently at these blocks, oblivious to anything else in the room, stacking and restacking them, over and over. The blocks would come tumbling down, but he wouldn’t get upset. He just picked them back up and started stacking them again.

He looked up and noticed me watching him, and I smiled. He smiled back at me and said, “It’s hard.”

I said, “Yes, it is, but you can do it.”

This continued until dinner was finished, and I made him sit at the table to eat. As soon as we finished dinner, though, while my daughter was helping me wash dishes, Aleck went right back to the blocks again—stacking and restacking. It seemed no matter how long he sat there, no matter how long he tried, no matter how many times the blocks fell, he was not going to stop stacking his blocks until he made whatever it was he wanted to make.

Three blocks was it, the limit. Once he added one more on  top, the blocks all fell down again. The process started over. My son’s father was not as amused by the block episode as I was. He kept trying to help my son stack the blocks, and my son would push his hand away and say, “No, I do it.”

After trying to stack these blocks all night long, at least three hours worth of time spent on this endeavor, my son’s father said to me, “He’s obsessed with those blocks. Get him something else to play with so he doesn’t get discouraged.”

Then Aleck’s father left, and I gave Aleck back his blocks, and Aleck started stacking them all over again. This
continued until bedtime, and then I made him pick the blocks up and put him in bed.

The next morning, when I woke, my son was already awake  and was sitting on the floor of his bedroom, stacking and restacking the blocks, trying to build a tower of blocks more than three blocks high.

I just smiled and said good morning, and then went on into the kitchen to start my morning coffee. Soon after, I took a shower, and when I came back into the living room, my son was in there with my daughter watching Saturday morning cartoons.

I figured he’d given up on building his block tower, until I walked past his bedroom, and there on the floor was a little
pile of blocks, and right in the middle were four blocks, precariously stacked on top of each other, but still standing.
Behind me I hear, “I did it,” and Aleck pointed proudly at the little tower he had created before turning to toddle on back into the living room and watch cartoons again.

No one told Aleck he needed to stack these blocks and make a standing tower. He wanted to do it for himself. No
one set a limit on how many he had to do. Aleck knew what he wanted, and when he achieved it, he was satisfied. No matter how many times he tried, and failed, he never quit. He never said, “I can’t.” He never said, “It’s too hard.”
Nobody told my son that it would be hard for him to take his first steps either. No one told him he would have to try
harder than other kids to build up his muscles so that they supported him enough to walk. He was just a baby. He had no clue. He just did what he had to do, and in time, he took those first steps.

Today, I can barely get him to sit still, always running, jumping, climbing or getting into something.

I wonder sometimes how different things might have been if Aleck had understood how hard it was for him to walk
compared to others, or if someone had told him he couldn’t build that tower of four little blocks and because of that,
Aleck didn’t try.

In our lives, there will be people who mean well and try to keep us from getting discouraged. Much like my son’s father told me to give Aleck another toy, these people in your life will try to help you focus on other things when you seem to get stuck in a spot and can’t move forward.

What if my son’s father had told me, “Don’t take him to the doctor any more. Don’t encourage him to walk. It’s too hard for him, just let him be”?

Well, then my son might never have walked, or if he did, it might have taken a lot longer before he did.

When it comes right down to it, only you can set your own limitations, and sometimes, you set these limitations for
yourself by simply allowing other people to discourage you from doing that which you want to do.

There is another thing that is important to remember too. I could have easily stacked the four blocks for my son, or at the very least tried to help him like his father did. If I had stacked them for Aleck, the blocks would have been
stacked, but Aleck would not have been able to say, “I did it.”

Surround yourself with people who encourage you to do that which you want or need to do for yourself, and keep stacking your blocks. Don’t ever let someone say, “You can’t.” Don’t ever let someone do for you what you need and want to do for yourself. It may seem easier at the time, but in the end, you have to do it for you.

Instead, find those people in your life that, when you say, “It’s hard,” will tell you, “Yes, it is, but you can do it.”

Otherwise, you’ll miss that moment when you can point and smile and say, “I did it.”