I loved this question – does the sun melt away the clouds? We were getting in the car on the school run and it was supposed to be hot. Really hot. The kind of hot weather that dominates the news and has everyone talking (complaining) about it. So hot some schools were closing – don’t get me started on that one! One rule for the government, one for parents. Like a true cult!!

My son had been particularly invested in the forecast because it had recently been his birthday. He always likes it to be hot on his birthday, and this particular day had been promised to reach 28 degrees. But when we stepped outside, there were clouds hanging over the house. He asked…

“Does the sun melt away the clouds?”

“Sort of,” I replied. “People usually say the sun burns the clouds off.”

“So it melts them away.”

“Well, not exactly. It burns them off.”

“So, melts them away?”

Back and forth we went. Eventually I stopped and thought: why am I arguing this point? It really didn’t matter whether the sun burns the clouds away or melts them away. Yet there I was trying to correct him because I’d heard the phrase “the sun burns off the clouds” my entire life.

Later on on this particularly hot day we were having a bbq and my son was watching the coal burn. And he asked my husband…

“Will the coal melt?”

And again for something burning he used the word melt. Which is probably the opposite word.

Now I have found that with my son, I often have to think the opposite way to how I would naturally think. When he cries, my instinct is to cuddle him and tell him everything is ok. In reality, what he usually needs is space and silence. When I need him to put his shoes on, my instinct is to ask him to put his shoes on. But a direct request can sometimes make it harder, not easier. Often he needs me to mention it casually, or better still, not mention it at all and allow him to get there in his own time.

And so it goes on. Time and time again, I have learned that what seems obvious to me isn’t always what works for him.

If you want my son to talk to you, the obvious thing to do would be to start a conversation. But more often than not, the quickest way to get him talking is to say very little at all.

And so I’ve learned to stop assuming that my way of seeing things is the only way of seeing them.

And perhaps language is no different. So melt or burn. This is a prime example………. I look at those coals and think they are burning. He looks at them and thinks they are melting. Heat melts things. Heat burns things. Neither observation comes from nowhere. What struck me wasn’t whether he was scientifically correct. It was the path his brain had taken to get there. While I reached for the familiar phrase I’d heard a thousand times before, he was looking at the world in front of him and making sense of it in his own way.

And as time goes on, and I spend more and more time in his world, I find myself starting to question everything. Questioning systems. Questioning processes. Questioning language. Questioning all the things I once accepted without thought.

He has changed everything I thought I once knew about the world.

And now I feel like I’m standing in between two worlds , his and the one I grew up in, wanting them to join up, but struggling to find the bridge between them. And in some ways, I now find myself understanding his world more than the one I was raised in.

So, does the sun melt the clouds?

Scientifically, maybe not. But I think I prefer to think of the sun as melting the clouds rather than burning them. And I know one thing for certain. My son melts my assumptions. He melts my certainty. He melts the way I used to see everything. And he definitely melts my heart too.