It was about fifteen years ago this month that I sat on our backyard porch with a cigarette in my hand and tears streaming down my face while a woman whose name I will never recall outlined for me by phone the extent of our three-year-old son’s “significant disabilities.” She was shocked, frankly, that we’d waited three years to have him tested. She heard the catch in my throat as she ran through the battery of test results (first percentile this, second percentile that) and said, “Oh honey, I really wish you’d come in so I could give you these results in person.” “Why?” I recall asking her. “So you could give me a hug?”
There are no sufficient words to describe the pain of learning my firstborn child was autistic. In the weeks that followed that conversation, I cried randomly and often. I woke up in the middle of the night already weeping with the word “freak” echoing in my head from nightmares I couldn’t remember. I walked around with my chest feeling like it had been set in cement. It seemed that every dream I’d had for my baby boy (college, family, career) had crashed into a million pieces that afternoon on the back porch. And the only dream I could think up to replace them all was this: May he find a place in this world where he feels he belongs.
There is no word in the English language that can describe how I felt today, watching that baby boy of mine in his cap and gown walk onto a stage, accept an empty document cover (there will be no real diploma–he never took a Regents exam after all), and shake hands with a variety of school officials. This is no ending really, and the road ahead is as unsure as it’s ever been. But I did not cry. I felt joy and also pain. I felt relief and also fear. It was pride and it was worry. It was sweet and bitter and surreal and all too soon. But my dream for him–the real one, the only one that ever mattered–that he feels like he belongs, that he fits in his own skin, that he’s just plain okay as he makes his way through life–that dream has come true. It’s still coming true, every day. Because he is LOVED. And love is EVERYTHING. The only thing. It’s not what you expect or what you dream. It’s so much simpler. And so much more.
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