the clipboard

“Now, shouldn’t that six be in the ten millions place?” I asked her, looking across the kitchen counter at the math worksheet. It was a bit crumpled, and the counter was lightly seasoned with eraser dust from quite a few corrections. I felt like it had been yesterday that the little girl was learning to read and to do simple addition. Now this fourth grader with her sparkling blue eyes and pony tail was busy comparing 9-digit numbers and dreaming of finished homework so she could log on to her instant messenger service.

As she spent a moment considering the next problem, I found myself daydreaming about her future—imagining how I would react to the first handshake with the boy that would someday become my son-in-law, and wondering where one of my kids ever got such a beautiful face.

“Dad, how do you do this one?” she asked, interrupting my time travel as she poked a well-worn eraser at a more complex problem further down the page.

I instinctively reached for a pad of scrap paper in my open briefcase so that I could illustrate the calculation. I almost always had my old clipboard in my case—I keep a pad of paper on it. I tore off what turned out to be the last sheet, and as I unclipped the spent cardboard backing to throw it away, I made a modest archeological discovery that changed my evening.

There beneath the scratch pad was a small stack of old papers that I had always kept behind the pad. Out of laziness I had habitually replaced the scratch pad each time without discarding the old collection beneath. For some reason those pages caught my attention that night. As my daughter continued work without me, I began thumbing through them, surprised to discover how old they had become.

At 42, what particularly caught my attention was a sampling of pages of technical scientific notes from a stage of my education at a California university in 1990—12 years earlier. A person has to be pretty lazy to unconsciously carry around extra 12-year-old sheets of paper. A few pages up in the chronology of my unexpected excavation was a photocopy that I didn’t immediately recall. It was a single page copied from a medical journal, and across the top was the title “Standard Anatomical Measures in Early Human Development." Circled in red in a table of data were figures labeled “brain ventricle measurements." I had dated the page August, 1993—a month before the birth of this charming young mathematician who was now counting decimal points and commas across from me.

A sense of realization swept over me as I recalled this sheet of paper, and the anxious afternoon in the medical library when I had originally found it.

Like thousands of parents expecting a perfect baby, my wife and I had found ourselves disoriented 9 years earlier when a routine ultrasound scan revealed mildly enlarged brain ventricle fluid within the head of our unborn daughter. The doctor had been matter-of-fact.

“When we see this kind of abnormality, it causes concern about future cognitive development and potential.”

I had remained numbly next to my wife in the darkened exam room, trying to figure out what I was supposed to say. My wife broke the silence—

“How soon would we know if this child actually has problems?” She then glanced at me questioningly. The doctor quickly stated that deficits were usually obvious by kindergarten, if they were going to occur.

That conversation had spawned a mad dash to the medical library—a dash so many moms and dads make one way or the other when they are given uncertain and chilling news. Today it’s usually a dash to the Internet. At the time we were mortified. I had forgotten the anguished prayers, the silent glances, the attempts at reassurance.
How soon we forget the dark times when the sun is shining. How often I wonder what I would do if any of the threatened tragedies in my life ever actually came true. It may have been a specific and gracious answer to prayer, or it may have been a normal variation inside our daughter’s skull, but whatever it had been, a normal baby girl was born September 16, 1993. I still recall cleaning up the lubricant residue from her silky hair after a follow-up brain ultrasound scan as she spent her first night outside of mom’s tummy.

Life and diaper changes and getting big sister to pre-school and a thousand other things quickly got into the way of our remembering to give thanks to God that the heart-wrenching concern had evaporated. This nine-year-old photocopy brought those days back to me, and I remembered that frantic feeling—“what if there is really something wrong with her?”

She was humming quietly now, as she finished her calculations. I looked at her with a depth of love that caught me by surprise. O how I cherish the life of this young lady, I realized. I knew then that I would have cherished her just the same regardless of whatever challenges had been placed in front of us. At the same time, as I held that old photocopy from an old medical text, I prayed a prayer of thanks that I should have been praying every day— every minute.


9.26.02