growing against the grain
June 13, 2015 § 2 Comments
Tomorrow our son will attend his first high school class without support. This is an exaggeration of course, he is not walking abandoned toward change. His teacher is as aware of his needs as he is of this newfound independence. We are, rather, moving against the familiar with a new experience of change. It is the way we accommodate opportunity.
For years our son has had the company of a personal aide in the context of his academic days. He has not yet matured into self sustained independence; still he is fiercely, passionately, willfully independent in his sense of self. Our experience is ever changing, consistently inconsistent; needs and ability contorting themselves into footholds of growth.
We do not succeed independent of difficult challenges. Neither are we alone in our accomplishments.
These past nine years we have evolved into an assumption of compromise and expectation of progress as we partner with professionals who meet us with anxious questions and eager uncertainty. There have been moments of crisis and conflict born of lessons in the disparity between professional training and necessary accommodations in anticipation of the spectrum of needs that inform the many experiences of special needs in mainstream classrooms.
There have also been humbling lessons in grace as we partner with rare souls who share our responsibility to our son’s education; learning alongside one another as we go.
I have come to understand that IEPs do little to guarantee resources and that kindness is a greater predictor of success. The labels that inform need also bind us to assumptions that are sometimes limiting in their generic untruths. We modify expectations without compromising our dreams.
This new moment is an anticipated uncertainty, one that finds me holding my breath, heart on my sleeve. Hope bound a little too tightly around so many variables I cannot control. In this experience I am exceptionally average, a mother with universal worries in an intimate experience of vulnerability.
So I try to gather words and a tender posture of faith, something that looks like confidence and feels like false bravado.
scribblechic 
As someone who helps beginning teachers make the first steps with students this rings so close to the ears…
I’m glad, Maurice. When I speak to my family’s experiences I often wonder if my children’s teachers would echo my sentiments.