A Time to Work, A Time to Cuddle

The other day, I was going through the developmental report of one of my new clients; a 4-year old child who is suspected to have ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder)… Some details in the child’s background information grasped my attention. The information included reports from the mother saying that the child spent the first three years of his life mainly with his nanny, who happen to have a partial hearing loss. This could have, to some degree, affected the child’s verbal abilities due to lack of proper stimulation at a time that is considered crucial in the child’s life, let alone one with a suspected developmental disability.

Of course, the evaluation report did not mention why the child spent more time with his nanny than with his parents, but my guess would go for “a busy working schedule”; a typical case that I often see and hear about in my work place. I felt bad about the idea of having children, but not having time to spend with those children…

By the end of that day, I started counting the minutes to leave the clinic and head back home, to a specific spot that usually manages to make me smile after a long and hard working day; that corner in my room where I keep the cage of my baby hamster… As soon as my working day ended, I left the clinic, hurried home to my baby hamster, picked him up and cuddled him a little bit while feeling sorry down deep for leaving him alone all this time, around 9 hours with no human contact…

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I smiled, but this time, I didn’t only smile because my hamster looked so cute, but because I remembered that I was feeling guilty about not spending proper time with my baby hamster, while others do that for years with their baby humans…