We've nearly done a week of normal and all still hanging in there...the family scattered in three directions on Monday morning with Simon back at work, Felix off to stay with friends and Rose and I off to...drumroll...yes...that would be physio... Having hardly breathed for the first three days today started to seem a little less like Rose immersion therapy and a little more like life. The intensity is, well, intense and is going to take a bit of getting used to - I am living in a Rose sized vacuum mainly watching her little pink trainers take one tentative step after another and looking wildly around me for frayed corners of carpets, icy patches, swarms of small children and wishing I could roll her head to toe in bubble wrap. What would be odd about going to school like that? Sounds really sensible to me.
Rose was very subdued without the boys and maintaining an artificially jolly atmosphere took most of the first day but then it was time for school. Promoted to the corridor for most of the time - although I have made guest appearances at break time and hymn practice so far - it is both wonderful and painful for me and pretty much just wonderful for Rose to be there. Co-operating with the staff and highly motivated to protect Rose from falling wherever possible I am there in the role of supervising manouevres round the school, indoor break and toilet patrol - it is a pretty unglamourous role and I hope it won't be for too long! Rose is gettingly worryingly used to it already and showing no signs of despatching me yet - it's a major deal just for her to be there and no one really gets it but it will get easier I'm sure. She hasn't sprained her ankle or broken her leg and she's not just another child on crutches - to see her settled in a classroom and not a hospital bed after so many, many months is very emotional and wonderful but the little girl that ran out of school last March is gone for good and in her place is a young lady with a very, very old head on her shoulders. She has seen and experienced things that none of her friends or teachers have experienced, is familiar with language no child should know, nothing is over for her and I think she will find it hard to settle straight back into the innocence of her group. She certainly has a moral superiority over people ten times her age that she's never asked for or wanted and it's going to be hard to revert to being told off for not going to the loo in break or for talking in class! Just another learning curve and Rose is an expert at those.
So keeping Rose safe is now a part time job at school whilst juggling physio, hydro, and endless thousand repetitions of exercises. Every trip up or downstairs takes ten minutes and like a mini version of a cantankerous old lady she shouts and summons me from the other end of the house whenever she can't quite reach the remote control, the toy she wants, needs the loo (again), a drink, a snack aaagggghhhh...I am finding reserves of patience I never knew I had and holding on tight to them! I have NEVER been so pleased to see Simon as I've been each night this week and nor has Rose - the little girl who didn't turn a hair before if he was abroad for days at a time has been replaced with a real Daddy's girl who lights up when he walks in at night and cries when he leaves in the morning. And for Simon - he has walked back this week into a very different and subdued world from the one he left behind at work and needs to reabsorb himself back into it - without worrying too much every day about Rose and how she is getting on. So it's a shaky start but it's a start and we are all well on our way back to the outside world...
