The Report That Is Not Written Yet

He is seven and he is currently very interested in the London Underground, and he can tell you which lines interchange at which stations with a fluency that has made two adults laugh in the last month.

He does not like the sound the hand dryer makes. He does not like it so much that they have a route round town that avoids two particular cafes.

The school raised it in the spring, kindly, in a small room with a box of tissues on the table that she noticed and resented.

There has been an observation. There has been a form that took her four evenings and asked, among other things, whether he plays imaginatively, which is a question she has now thought about roughly six hundred times.

There is another appointment in nine weeks and after that there will be a report.

And here is the thing she does at about eleven at night, and she has done it every night since March.

She reads. She reads pages written by people who do not know him, and she looks up terms, and she finds a forum where somebody describes something that sounds nothing like him and something that sounds exactly like him, and she goes to bed at one.

Underneath all of it is a sentence she has never said out loud, and it is not the one people would assume. It is not I hope he is fine.

It is: when that report comes, will I still see him, or will I only see it.

That is you, and the report cannot do what you are afraid it will do.

Three things I am not doing

I am not going to tell you what the report will say. I do not know and neither does anybody who has not sat with him.

I am not going to tell you whether an assessment is a good idea. It is, generally, because a description of how a child works is what unlocks the help that fits him, but that is a conversation for you and the people who know his case and not for a page on the internet.

And I am not going to tell you to pray for a particular outcome and expect it. He is who he is, he was who he is in March, and nothing written in nine weeks will change one thing about him. It will only change what is known about him.

You are not waiting on a verdict about your son. Scripture says the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and that is said about a boy everybody else had already sorted into a category, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a parent seeing a child rather than a form.

What the psalm says about how he was made

There is a passage in Psalm 139 that gets read at baby dedications and is far stranger and more useful than the occasion usually allows.

For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made... and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:13-16

Two things in there, and take them slowly.

Fearfully and wonderfully made. Not made adequately, and then improved. The word is about awe. Whatever your son's wiring turns out to be described as, it was not an accident that happened to a design, because the psalm has God present at the making rather than arriving afterwards to assess it.

And then the second: in thy book all my members were written. There is already a book. It was written before there was anything to write about, and it is God's.

Which means the document you are dreading in nine weeks is not the first account of your son. It is the second, and it is a much smaller one, and it can only describe the parts of him that a room and a checklist can reach.

You are not waiting to find out what your son is. Scripture says in thy book all my members were written, Psalm 139:16, and the first and truest account of him was finished before he was born, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on a clinician to find out who he made.

A description is not a person

This is the distinction I would most like you to have before the report lands, because the night it arrives is not a good night to be working it out.

A report describes how somebody works. Where the input overwhelms. Where the language goes. What helps. That is genuinely useful and it is why you are doing this. Scripture settles that in Psalm 139:13-16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

It does not tell you who he is. It has nothing to say about whether he is funny, or kind to a smaller child, or the particular way he tells you a thing he is excited about. Those are not measurable and they are not absent from him; they are simply outside what the instrument can see.

So when it comes, read it as a manual and not as a biography.

And notice that you already know most of what will be in it. Four evenings on that form was you writing it. The hand dryers, the route round town, the Underground: you have been the world expert on this child for seven years, and the report will confirm you rather than inform you.

You are not going to lose sight of him. Scripture says charity thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth, 1 Corinthians 13:6, and love in that sentence is a thing that welcomes accurate information rather than fearing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a mother's eyes on the boy on the floor rather than on the paperwork.

The eleven o'clock reading

The reading at night has to stop, or at least change shape, and it is not because information is bad.

It is because at eleven at night, alone, with a search box, you are not gathering information. You are trying to get certainty out of a machine that does not sell it, and the reason you go back is that each page gives you about four minutes of feeling in control. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 139:13-16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

You will not read your way to peace about this. Nine weeks of one in the morning will cost you exactly the alertness the appointment needs.

Set an end to it: one hour, in the daytime, from one source, on a day of the week. Then close it.

And spend one of those reclaimed evenings on the Underground with him, letting him tell you about interchanges, because that is time with your son rather than time with a version of him assembled out of other people's children.

You are not required to become an expert to be a good mother. Scripture says be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God, Philippians 4:6, and made known is the whole of the instruction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a case file a parent cannot.