Today was amazing. I am totally buzzing and ready to drop from too little sleep and too much activity, but I am so glad that I was able to do everything I had planned. After five months of attending all-day school, I was finally able to spend some time observing my son's class, and I was blown away. My sweet James is almost six years old, and much of his education has been adapted to meet his special needs as an autistic. This has mostly centered around speech therapy and efforts to fully develop his fine motor skills so that he can someday write and speak to the world at large. The process has been long and difficult, for, as his first speech therapist explained, she had to start at zero to teach him language. But this current school year has been marked by tremendous progress on every front, most noticeably an increase in communication. One example is the yes or no question; for so long, a question asked in this format got no response, then if prompted to answer "yes or no", he would simply repeat "Yes or no." So we were overjoyed when he began to answer a straight "Yes" or "No", in accordance with his actual wants and needs.
Therefore, I was completely floored to hear my son sing along with FOUR different songs with his class in circle time, followed by an individual recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Does my son know what "One nation, indivisible" or "Liberty and justice for all" mean? No. But he said those words, that unifying pledge, without hesitation, and I wanted to cry, my heart was so full. James actually has a friend in his class, his buddy from the bus, Sam. I met Sam on the first day of school. Its hard to miss him. He's the boy in the wheelchair. Now, for all the difficulties and extra services needed to raise a child with autism, I cannot imagine how much more Sam's parents have to do for him. I will admit, whenever I see anyone in a chair, I just think of how much WORK the people around them have to put in. And here I sat, in this classroom full of children with special needs, feeling so proud of my child and all he has overcome, and then Sam spoke. He talked back and forth with the teacher about how he lost another tooth over the weekend. He smiled and participated in the circle time. A little later, during their free time, with my son happily crashing cars on the floor, I found myself sitting beside Sam. Somehow spider webs came up, and how that is a spider's home. I turned to Sam and asked, "Do you live in a web?" I didn't know what to expect; with my own children, I don't get much of a response from the imaginative conversation attempts. Sam turned his mega-watt smile on me, and said, "No." He waited. "Do you live in a tree?" I asked. He thought about this for a moment, and his smile got even brighter (how that was possible, I don't know). "YES!" he said. "I live in a tree! Tell the teacher! Tell her right now! I live in a tree!" I started cracking up at his answer, and then we looked around the room and decided that two other boys in the class live in a cave in a mountain, and James and Sam live together in a house in a tree. In that moment, that small conversation, I got a glimpse of what his parents must feel every day...not how difficult he is, but what a JOY he is. Yes, his food has to be mashed and thickened for every meal. An adult is needed to push his chair around the building, and he rides the special bus that has a lift to get him on and off everyday. But that's the what. Sam is the who.
It seems to be the theme of my adult life, this realization that every person is actually a person; not a stereotype or a label. No one thing defines me, nor my children, so why do I always assume that it does others? Today was amazing. Not just because my son is getting a fantastic education, but because I am too.
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