Yada is born to a young single mother in her early twenties. She is born with big brown eyes and an easy smile.

I’m so lucky, her mother tells everyone, she is such an easy baby. Once fed and changed, Yada cries little, smiles often and seems very content.

In her early months Yada’s eyes are still developing in order to focus. She could see only within a foot or so at first. Because her mother is very busy almost all of the time, Yada keeps herself busy too with whatever is around her within her eyes’ focus. The glossy bars of her crib. The matrix of kittens printed on her sheets. Beyond those, she can only see fuzzy objects moving around, like faraway planets orbiting.

Sometimes, one particular fuzzy object would get closer and closer to her. Then it gets close enough and suddenly becomes Yada’s mother! Yada is overjoyed! She smiles and giggles and can’t have enough of her. Yada could feel a surge of sorts pass her mother’s eyes when she looks at Yada, which she would later learn is adoration and guilt.

Yada really wants to hold on to that face, so warm, and so rich in colors and texture, and moves! But soon her mother puts her down and goes back to being a fuzzy object moving this way and that. And so Yada goes back to the crib bars and painted kittens. She feels like they might have a story to tell her.

When she starts school, her teacher says Yada is a very nice girl and possibly very bright. Yada sees that the teacher is in the front of the classroom, always going on and on about something. But she really prefers to look out the window which she sits next to. The bees would come and visit in the warm months and she swears she can tell them apart. It always makes her smile. When it is cold outside and the windows have to be closed, she gazes at the back of the head that belongs to the boy sitting in front of her. His hair is clipped short and the hair circle on his crown looks like the swirl on a snail shell. Or like when she stirs her sugared oatmeal in a super fast circle. Sometimes she even giggles a little because it is really very funny.

One day the teacher tells Yada’s mother that they need to talk. Everyone adores Yada here, she says to her, but she seems to suffer from inattentive ADHD — sort of like a scattered brain. With Yada there, she asks her mother about early childhood development. Yada can see a surge of sorts pass her mother’s eyes, which she would later learn is shame.

Yada really loves her mother very much and doesn’t want anything to cause her shame. It takes her a lot of effort but she learns to guess at what makes the teacher stop believing she has “the problem”. Trial and errors first, then steadily she guesses more correctly than not — the answers to homework and exams, the eye contact sought and connected. Soon the teachers are satisfied. They no longer reports “the problem” to her mother, and Yada even gets gold stars next to her name on the wall.

Yada smiles. She knows that she manages to ration some time, to finally find out what that yellow Tweedy Bird has been really up to, chirping and pecking away, in the big willow tree.