By Kate Croft
@pocketsfullofacorns

My eyes settle on my eight-year-old daughter, perched on the edge of a gray plastic chair. She swings her sparkly denim shoes back and forth between the chair’s front legs, more concerned about the snacks we’ve packed than about what will unfold this morning. I scan the psychologist’s waiting room and swallow the lump in my throat.

A row of identical plastic chairs lines a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Dusty, white horizontal blinds obscure my view of a tired strip mall parking lot. The check-in desk supports a rack of sticky children’s books. A pock-marked ceiling tile in the corner swirls with stains in shades of coffee. Three stark, white doors occupy the wall on the other side of the room.

My daughter studies the room with me and notices a tiny ant crawling across the floor.

“Can I rescue it, Mommy?” she asks, as if the ant is all that matters.

Before I can nod and smile, there are six black legs crawling across her palm. The creature doesn’t leave her affectionate gaze on their short trip outside. I peek through a slit in the dusty blinds to watch her kneel in the middle of the sidewalk and set it free.

While I wait for my daughter to find her way back inside, I thumb through a folder on my lap filled with samples of her school work, checking to make sure my sweaty palms haven’t stained the blue manilla.

When the psychologist appears with a cheerful smile minutes later, it’s time for me to hand over the folder, offer my daughter a quick hug, and settle into a rhythm of anxious foot tapping. She and the doctor step through the furthest white door into the room where they’ll spend the next few hours piecing together the puzzle of my daughter’s mind.

It is at this moment that I envy the ant, crawling through a crack in the sidewalk outside, free from the weight of waiting rooms, manilla folders, and worry.

***

If I gathered all the world’s animals on a scale, ants would comprise a noticeable measure of the writhing pile, solidifying their place as one of the most recognizable insects on Earth.

They are notorious for making homes on every continent except Antarctica. Ants live in complex colonies and have extraordinary memories, but perhaps most impressive is their ability to carry objects up to fifty times their body weight despite their tiny size.

Ants are so strong and capable, in fact, that thousands of species of plants rely on them to spread their seeds through elaiosomes. Fleshy structures rich in fats and proteins, elaiosomes act as a nutritional cocktail specifically designed to attract ants. Ants sniff out these seeds and hoist the delectable morsels onto their backs. 

Picture a winding trail of six-legged creatures on the forest floor, balancing seeds wildly disproportionate to their size. Imagine the ants hauling these seeds back to their colonies, step by back-breaking step. The ants unload their burdens, feed their babies the elaiosome, and discard the seeds somewhere they can sprout.

These ants can’t hear, and some of them can’t even see. They lack the senses much of the rest of the animal kingdom relies on for survival. Even so, they bear their load, and their feat ensures growth and success for both their little ones and the seeds they plant.

Of all the living things that could have joined us in that waiting room, it’s no surprise my daughter finds an ant.

***

“I think it’s time we made an appointment,” I said to my husband a few weeks earlier. He agreed.

Our days were filled with below grade level schoolwork. Tears. Angry outbursts. Frustration. Discouragement.

At first, we shrugged it off as part of her personality. She’s strong-willed. She’s just being stubborn. She’ll grow out of it.

Then, we wrestled with the fact that something could be wrong. But she’s brilliant, we thought. The kid who can find all the lost things. The little person with the astonishing memory for which sister owns which indistinguishable miniature collectible toy. The daughter who can write her name backward in cursive. The child who spoke in full sentences months before she turned two. The one with the notebook full of designs and the desk covered in projects and inventions.

But the signs persisted. Backward letters. Backward numbers. More tears. A third grader who still couldn’t read or write.

I watched her furrow her brows and dig in her heels at the easy readers, the ones with the three-letter words that repeat on each page, designed for someone half her age. I listened to her voice waver when it was time for reading practice. I saw her face fall when I revealed we needed to fix most of her math worksheet together.

She erased tear-stained holes into the paper like she was trying to make it all disappear. 

***

My daughter was a few months away from her first day of school when ants invaded our house. One summer morning, with the dark, heavy clouds of her learning challenges still looming in the distance, I woke up to find a pile of crumbled Cheerios and Goldfish crackers wedged in a crack under the patio door where the caulking was loose. Dozens of ants trailed the four feet between the crack and the dining table, some dragging morsels from yesterday’s snacktime across the dining room floor.

A few of the six-legged creatures gathered around a sticky drop of dried apple juice on the living room floor. One in the kitchen. Another by the front door. 

In the time it took me to text my husband about picking up ant traps on the way home from work, my daughter hauled an old shoebox and a container of markers out of the craft supply cupboard. She decorated the outside of the box with designs of pink, purple, and lime green—her favorite colors—before adding a cube of damp sponge and a few dried oats she scooped off the unwiped breakfast table.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“It’s a house for my ant friends,” she answered, with so much sparkle in her eyes that I gritted my teeth and allowed it.

She spent the rest of the morning puttering around the house, gathering the rogue ants in the kitchen and the living room. She placed the wriggling pests in their new home without crushing their fragile exoskeletons and named them, insisting she could tell them apart.

She cared for them all day: adding drops of water to the sponge, refilling their crumb bowl, and taking them out to crawl on her hands for exercise. She watched them with such intense concentration, I began to wonder what she knew about these critters that I didn’t. 

***

“She’s a very bright little girl,” the psychologist says, handing me 10 crisp pages that summarize the hours of my daughter’s educational testing sessions. 

I wait for the “but.”
I know there will be a “but.”

I need there to be a “but.”

We scan the detailed, color-coded report together. The psychologist tosses out terms like “processing speed” and “visual verbal memory” and “academic skills.” She points to the charts and numbers covering the pages. She reviews my daughter’s strengths and confirms our suspicions about her weaknesses. The report culminates in a diagnosis: a learning disability.

“But this doesn’t have to hold her back,” the doctor suggests before handing me a list of resources and suggestions for how to support my child’s extraordinary brain.

We leave the pediatric therapy clinic, armed with a name for the weight I’ve been carrying—like a seed on my own shoulders—and a dash of hope.

***

“You know how my brain is different and reading is hard?” my eight-year-old asks her sister while demonstrating the miniature zipline she fashioned out of string and a toy bin she emptied minutes earlier.

The question hangs in the air like it’s been weighing on my shoulders in the weeks since her diagnosis. I hold my breath, a sinking feeling in my stomach. She will have to work so much harder than her peers to learn the same things, and I worry about the days she will feel the weight of her differences.

She shrugs and continues: “Well, it helps me to be good at other things, like noticing patterns and designing things.”

I exhale. I feel so helpless when she struggles to string words together in sentences on a page and to form the number five. I’m so desperate to carry this seed for her, passing it back and forth between us in an awkward dance.

But as surprising as it seems, she bears this weight with ease. Her differences make her capable, and I am learning to let her shoulder her seed, to watch her defy gravity.

She is carrying it all.

Guest essay written by Kate Croft. Kate is a high school English teacher turned homeschool mom. She and her husband live in Ontario, Canada with their three daughters. When she’s not reading, baking, or sipping earl grey tea, she's probably exploring nature with her family. You can find her on Instagram and on Substack.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.