The Gift of Time: Why My Daughter Needed Fifteen Years to Bloom

She was born with one kidney, even though every ultrasound before her birth had shown two. In fact, the scans had shown a perfectly healthy baby girl — normal development, nothing to worry about. This perfectly healthy girl, with the good ultrasounds, also had an extra rib and an abnormal aortic arch.

Somehow the scans, even though they looked crisp and clear, had shown an inaccurate picture of what was real.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Cor 13:12) I didn’t know then how much that verse would come to describe our journey with her.

The pregnancy had followed a normal path until 31 weeks, when I first measured slightly larger than I should. It wasn’t enough to be alarming. By 34 weeks, my doctor ordered another ultrasound. There was some extra fluid, but the baby looked fine. By 37 weeks, he was at a loss — every test came back normal, and there was no explanation for why my measurements kept climbing. When we talked about inducing at 39 weeks, he made a joke about the flood that would happen when my water broke.

He wasn’t wrong.

Labor itself wasn’t harder than my others. But afterward I passed out — not from sedation, just a deep, pulling sleep I couldn’t fight off. Dennis knew something wasn’t right. Not just with me, but with our new baby girl. The pediatrician wasn’t concerned — until my husband urgently called her back as she was walking out of the room. Our daughter was turning blue.

They rushed her to the NICU. After hours of testing, they finally had an answer: her esophagus wasn’t fully connecting to her stomach. She couldn’t swallow. All that extra fluid — the mystery my doctor couldn’t explain — was likely because she hadn't been able to swallow it away. The pregnancy had been the first chapter of a story nobody knew how to read yet.

She spent her first eight weeks in the NICU. She came home on a feeding tube until she was seventeen weeks old, then needed thickened liquids and limited food options until she was nearly three. At eleven months, she was back in the hospital — eleven days on oxygen for severe bronchiolitis. At thirteen months, she began vomiting at nearly every meal. She stopped gaining weight. She had been walking, but now she was tottering and falling more often. By sixteen months, doctors we talking about a failure to thrive diagnosis, even though that was a pretty rare for a child her age who had been thriving. Eventually — after dozens of tests — the discovery of a bingo chip lodged in the stricture (where the first surgery happened) of her esophagus, silently blocking her ability to swallow.

Speech therapy. Occupational therapy. The medical complications created a wave of delays.

She was not quite three years old when we lost our son Jayden. Grief made everything blurry — the days, the lessons. I kept teaching through it because I didn’t know how to stop. I was only focusing on doing the next thing on the list and getting through another day for quite a while.

By the time she was four, most of the medical crises had quieted. But as one door was closing, another was opening.

A Rough Start

Something No One Else Was Seeing

I kept homeschooling because I believed it could flex around any child — any need, any pace, any mystery that hadn’t revealed itself yet. No classroom could do what we were doing. I held onto that when I had nothing else.

Around age four, her speech therapist pulled me aside. She had been noticing for several weeks that my daughter seemed to have different skill levels on some days than on others — not in a specific, trackable way yet, just consistently enough that she had wanted to keep watching before she said anything.

I felt something loosen in my chest. Someone else had seen it.

Up to that point, I had been quietly convinced that I was manufacturing problems — that exhaustion and emotional investment had warped my view. The people closest to me didn’t understand what I was describing. I was watching something unfold that I couldn't prove to anyone around me, and the loneliness of that had been wearing me down.

But the speech therapist had seen it too. Validation.

That conversation didn’t give me answers. But it gave me something I desperately needed: confirmation that I wasn’t imagining it.

Insurance only covered the most basic speech therapy after age four, so I found a free program through a local college for her fifth year. When that program wrapped up, we were told she would receive speech therapy through school. Except we hadn’t planned on her going to school. I tried to work on speech with her myself, but I knew this was an area I wasn’t equipped to handle alone. So I started making calls to find out how a homeschool student could access those school services.

What the System Missed

When I was told she would need an evaluation, I was glad. I wasn't just looking for speech help anymore. I wanted to understand what was behind her learning struggles. I hoped they could help me name it.

I had been watching the same pattern for years — the inconsistency, the memory that worked one day and vanished the next, the learning that never carried over. I couldn't search for answers to a problem I couldn't name. A diagnosis wasn't about labeling my daughter. It was about opening a door.

One of the professionals asked me what a label would do for me. I didn't have a clean answer. I said I thought it might give me some guidance. What I couldn't fully explain yet was that research is how I operate. Without a name, I was searching in the dark.

They were frustrated that I brought my other children along. I didn't have child care, and I thought a school would be a kid-friendly place.

She was annoyed when I asked if they were going to test her retention or comprehension. I wasn't rude. I had never seen these tests done and I wanted to know what to expect.

The assessments took three days. Their evaluation barely scratched the surface. There was no curiosity about the pattern I had been watching for years, no depth to the questions she was asked, no follow-through on my observations.

Days later, when the assessments were done, I sat at a conference table in the local elementary school, respectfully. I took notes. I was genuinely trying to learn from them, even as my stomach was in knots over what they might think of me.

What I got from the superintendent was a verdict and a lecture. I had never believed I was better than a trained professional. I respected their knowledge. I had been trying to borrow from it. I didn't push back even though his comment was uncalled for.

I felt judged for a judgment I had never made.

I didn't continue pursuing help through that channel. And his attitude — more than almost anything else — made it clear why I would keep homeschooling even when it wasn't easy. Not out of spite. But because I had seen what shallow help looked like, and I knew my daughter deserved someone who would dive deep.

Years later, I was sitting in a therapy session for one of my other children when the doctor mentioned processing disorders in passing — how the brain's wiring could affect the way information traveled, how it showed up differently from child to child.

Something clicked. I went home with a new term and found my daughter on every page I read. The inconsistencies. The memory that vanished. The learning that never transferred from one context to the next. It was all there.

I still don't know what difference that name would have made at six. But I know it would have confirmed the one thing I needed most: that I wasn't imagining it.

Every Step, Every Context

She liked school. That was the thing that made it so disorienting.

Worksheets made her feel capable and grown. She worked happily beside her siblings, completely unaware that what she was doing looked nothing like what they were doing. The gap that consumed my thoughts didn't register for her at all. She would finish a page of simple problems with a grin like she'd done something great.

Sometimes I had to look away.

She needed a lot of repetition. But repetition alone wasn't the problem. With most children, learning one thing opens a door to the next. A child who understands addition grasps subtraction because the connection between the two makes natural sense. She never made those connections. Not in math, grammar, phonics, or reading. Every concept had to be built from scratch, with no assumption that yesterday's work was still there.

I would teach her something. She would seem to have it. The next day we would start again from nothing.

The older she got, the clearer the pattern became — and the more confusing. She could play pretend cashier and count back change without missing a beat. Five minutes later, the same subtraction problem written on a page was completely foreign to her. She could read a short story and narrate it back with real understanding — and not know what several of the key words in that story actually meant. When I taught her how to study vocabulary definitions for a spelling test, I had to give her the exact same lesson again when it was time to study science. The method didn't carry over. Nothing carried over.

When we got to fractions I tried the pizza illustration. Most children feel the logic right away — a whole pizza is six sixths, you can see it, hold it, eat it. She couldn't make that leap. The image and the numbers lived in separate places that never connected.

It wasn't that she couldn't learn. It was that what she learned in one place didn't follow her anywhere else. Every new context was its own beginning.

I struggled to stay patient, and that shamed me. How could she grin like that after doing the same problem the same wrong way for the fourth time? I had just told her one thing and she had done the complete opposite — not out of defiance, just cheerfully, as if she had heard something entirely different than what I had said. I loved her. I was also quietly coming apart in that schoolroom on some days, and I didn't feel like I could say that out loud to anyone.

We cycled through curriculum. Rod and Staff workbooks, which she had loved since the pre-k pages first made her feel like a real student. Abeka. Saxon Math. Winston Grammar and more. My own custom-designed lessons, unit studies, read-alouds, and flashcards. We would get several chapters into a textbook, hit a wall, and find ourselves back at chapter one. It felt like defeat every time. But it was necessary — the foundation had shifted again, and we had to go back and find where we'd lost her before we could move forward.

I kept going, not because I had reserves to draw from, but because stopping wasn't something I could see. Homeschooling gave us the one thing that season had to offer: time. No deadlines forcing her forward before she was ready. No ceiling someone else had set. Just the next day, and the next lesson, and the quiet belief that something was taking root even when I couldn't see it.

The Click

She had always been good at Bible quizzes. As a teen, she was finishing in the top ten at the monthly meets and qualifying for regional events. She had more Scripture memorized than most adults I know. That part of her had never struggled.

One frustrated evening, when she was fifteen, I asked her why she couldn't study spelling the way she studied for Bible quizzes.

I wasn't really expecting an answer. I was tired and venting more than teaching.

A lightbulb didn't just come on. Stadium lights did.

She tried it that week and earned her first A in spelling. Then she started thinking through how to apply the same idea to other subjects. The conversations that followed began more and more often with "Mom, I was thinking…" It was like watching someone wake up. The wiring had always been there. She had finally found the switch.

A few months later I was working on plans for the farm. I asked her, almost offhandedly, what she thought she wanted to do with her life. She said she knew she wanted to work with animals — but she wasn't a very good student, so she didn't know what she could actually do.

I stopped what I was doing.

I told her she wasn't a bad student. She was a student who had to work harder than other students. Then I said: "You just learned how to study your spelling words and your grades went from C's and D's to A's. Maybe you need to learn how to learn. Learn how to learn each subject. Once you figure that out, you could do anything."

She took it to heart.

The Payoff

She is seventeen now and a straight A student. On the rare occasion she gets a poor score, she looks the work over, throws it away, and starts again. She doesn't spiral. She doesn't quit. She troubleshoots.

She has learned how to learn. That is the best lesson of all.

She will do a fifth year of high school, and she is meeting it with good grades and real grace. The slow progress of those early years left a lot of ground to make up. She is doing it without complaint.

I think about that superintendent sometimes. Not with anger. I just think about him when she shows me a great test score and grins like she's won something.

She has.

What Made This Possible

I want to say something clearly before I speak to the mom who is still in the hard season.

What happened in our schoolroom was not luck, and it was not just a mother who refused to give up. It was made possible by what homeschooling uniquely offers.

Public school teachers are dedicated, and they genuinely want every child to succeed. I am in awe of the men and women who can work with a full classroom. But the system isn't perfect.

By high school, they ask students where they want to be as adults. But a student who has carried years of learning gaps often carries something else too — insecurities. She may not be able to see her own potential. She almost certainly doesn't know how to name her gaps, let alone build a plan to fill them.

A classroom, through no fault of the teacher, simply doesn't have the time to allow for that kind of slow, patient work.

Homeschooling gave us the time we needed to do that. It gave us the flexibility to go back to chapter one as many times as we needed to, and the freedom to work toward a future with no ceiling. Her story was only possible because we had room to let it unfold on her terms.

For the Mom in the Slow Season

If you are in it right now — if nothing is clicking, if the people around you are questioning your choices, if someone in a position of authority has told you that you are the problem — I want you to hear this:

Some kids need fifteen years to bloom. That is not failure. That is not proof that you made the wrong choice. It is proof that your child needed someone willing to stay in the field and keep working even when the harvest isn't visible yet.

Homeschooling gave us the gift of time. No deadline. No ceiling. No one pulling her out of our schoolroom because she didn't fit the timeline.

For my daughter, that gift changed everything.