A wise person must have said this once. Wise people always say that kind of stuff.

If I had been wiser, I would have thought of this kind of one-liner on the appropriately-misty day, just after Easter, when another email found its way into my inbox.

If I had been wiser, I would have been less surprised by the contents of this particular 'sign':

Dad
I have decided that on June 1st I shall come to school in Brussels; this is the first time I have said this with confidence! Before I said I was going back after half-term and not feeling very sure, but now I’m sure!

Love u loads
J.

PS You’re the first person I told, since I thought it was to you that it was most relevant!

No big deal? Well, I guess not, unless you consider that the clouds had well and truly settled over our family these past seven months; unless you consider that only a week previously I had begun to resign myself to the fact that, despite all my best efforts, I was powerless to help my own son work towards a resolution of the issues that he was facing.

Like the first time I held him in my arms, moments after he was born – terrified that I would mistakenly crush his tiny limbs – I found myself almost paralyzed for fear that I would say or do something to snuff out this fragile sign of hope.

Where is that wise person, with the right words to say, when you need him?

Along this long and lonely path, I had met a lot of people who informed me that they were wise. They passed around their wise words freely and, sometimes, without listening.

Many were well-intentioned, but few understood.

“Smack the taste out of his mouth and deal with it!” was the line that hurt the most.

Sometimes we are all too quick to judge, I guess.

Or perhaps, having run out of gold, frankincense and myrrh, some ‘wise men’ have less to give these days.

A couple of days ago, I thought of writing back to this anonymous sage. I thought of explaining that I neither smacked nor ‘dealt with it’ particularly well, but that my beautiful boy was good to his promise and spent the month of June in school; that he bravely conquered his fears, moved away from his ‘home’, established himself in another school, in another country, made friends, put his head down... and got 94% in his first assessed essay.

I wanted to be the smug. But wise men don’t do smug, do they? They know all too well how easy it is to say the wrong thing and how hard it is to find the words to capture and express how life really is.

For now, at least, both the mist and cloud have gone and we are enjoying those long, summer days.

To be sure, the road we have travelled has not been easy. But, as another wise man once wrote on the back of a bus, somewhere in Arizona: "It's hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere."

David Willows

David Willows is Director of External Relations at the International School of Brussels.  

David’s blog, Fragments: A storytelling approach to life and work, can be found here.