Total And Complete Mental Exhaustion

I am completely mentally exhausted. (Hence the title). I had a meeting yesterday at my daughter's school to discuss her language eval and her extended school year (summer) services. As I mentioned before, my daughter has a learning disability. She looks, acts, and seems so normal that it is often easy to forget about it, or at least tuck large parts of it under the proverbial rug.

So she qualifies now for speech/language services. She didn't before because she was given the Kindergarten assessment which doesn't include an expressive language test. And of course, expressive language is where she has the most difficulty. The therapist conducting the assessment was surprised at how high (good thing) her language comprehension was. Usually children have more correlation between their expressive and comprehensive language abilities. But M's language comprehension is actually quite good, surprisingly enough. Not surprising though, is her expressive language abilities. It's like she can get the information, understand what you are saying, but can't pass information from her brain to her mouth. She will "forget" common words like, uhm, tree. She can describe it upside down and backwards, but she can't verbalize the word "tree" (for example). Then another time she can do it fine.

So anyway, she will now be getting help for that.

Just yesterday, they completed some end of year testing with her. Her reading is still abominably low. She can identify words in one instance, and then not know them two sentences later, only for them to "come back" again later. She can't sound out words because she has forgotten the beginning sounds by the time she finishes the ending sounds.

The only area that has seen moderate improvement is numbers. And thank God for that. That "know it then not know it then know it again" has plagued her terribly with her numbers and they have been nearly impossible to get through her short term memory. We spent months just trying to "learn" the number 7!

But her difficulties are so so very damaging to her "school" learning ability. It was overwhelmingly disheartening to hear her evaluation reports. Everyone says over and over how sweet she is, how she tries so hard and works so diligently. But there is some kind of barrier in her brain that just won't let things through, either going in or coming out. It breaks my heart. I fear so greatly for her future. At 7, she has a learning disorder, which no one holds against her. As an adult, she'll just be seen as "dumb". She works so hard it's just not fair!

My chest hurts and my heart weeps. I wish so, so badly I could take this on for her instead.