The Year I Realized-Part 2

There is another piece of today’s realization that belongs in the story: Nathan.

Seeing Nathan again didn’t create my interest in child development, life skills, or occupational therapy. Those pieces were already part of me. But seeing him again—and then going back through my shelter memories and stories—seems to have brought an old part of myself back into focus.

I realized Nathan and I may have had more professional common ground than I understood when we worked together. The shelter wasn’t simply about helping children with schoolwork. We were working with kids who needed adults to help with routines, relationships, behavior, emotions, communication, independence, and everyday life skills. We were both part of teaching children how to do life.

Maybe that’s part of why he has remained meaningful to me. Caring for children has always mattered deeply to me, and I worked alongside someone who also chose work centered around helping children. I can’t know exactly what Nathan thinks or feels about those years today, but I do know we shared that work and those kids.

And seeing that he continued into helping work years later made me look at my own path differently too. His path is his, and mine is mine, but seeing where he went made me stop and ask where I might be going.

That led me back to the shelter, my child development degree, preschool, special education, life skills, and eventually the question of OTA.

So maybe Nathan’s unexpected return this year wasn’t about giving me a career direction. Maybe it simply held up a mirror to a part of myself I had forgotten to look at.

It made me think:

Wait a minute… I’ve been doing this kind of work all along.

I didn’t choose the wrong degree. I chose child development because, even before I had the words for it, I cared about the whole child.

And all these years later, I finally found a sentence for it:

I teach children how to do life.