scribblechic

It’s the smallest request, to hold a space for someone to belong. There is perhaps no greater kindness than to offer such generosity of acceptance to one another; no greater space than home in which to teach belonging except school. This is the heartache I have been sounding out for over a decade as I help my children navigate the broken spaces of their education.

I have written often these past years of academic challenges and the emotional harm of exclusion, but these themes were offered new insight last November through an online parenting course offered by Brené Brown. I’ve long admired her research on shame, but this course offered a discussion on belonging and fitting in that gave me a new language for contextualizing the challenges I have encountered as a mother raising special needs children.

I posed this question (specific to my son) towards the end of the curriculum:

How do we address subjects of shame and belonging when raising children with special needs? My sixteen year old boy (son) on the Autism Spectrum cries openly, fails colorfully and speaks genuinely, he has been made to feel “other” for these behaviors/qualities we celebrate and cultivate in adults.

In an effort to keep my question concise, I edited the following from my submission to the live Q&A session:

He has given his younger sister a model of masculinity I think is both rare and exceptional; his emotions and vulnerability, the brave and authentic way he navigates mixed messages underscores a deficit in social norms.

Maybe one day there will be a parenting class to discuss the significance of belonging over fitting in as we look to inclusive classrooms to model empathy and diversity.

Privately, in my personal notes, I mused:

I’ve also been thinking about how we categorize children, offering preferential treatment that harks back to an unhealthy selection mentality; students who are deemed gifted are granted an exclusivity of privileged resources that in turn limit the potential of a larger population with an assumption of inequality. 

This last wondering was specific to my daughter’s experience, but inclusive of so many misunderstood, stereotyped children. Those students ranked by generic test scores that exclude intelligence we cannot gauge in standard testing, but whose grit and resilience have made them stronger learners for their personal challenges. What might these children become if offered courses that encourage and inspire new passions?

I want to pause here to acknowledge the obvious deficit of editing. I debated tidying these thoughts into something beautiful, but there is an uncomfortable truth in the mess that I want to preserve for the integrity of my own experience. I am publishing them today to move them from the stagnancy of my drafts to better own them as an essential part of my story.

I considered offering a shorthand of harmful past experiences in the interest of identifying a pattern of exclusion that illuminate the essence of fitting in over belonging, but I want to speak instead to the rare moments of extraordinary kindness – of invitations to belonging.

For my son it was one teacher offering a safe place where others could not push, mock, tease or taunt for one period each day of his middle school career. During those three years she provided him his first experience of belonging, in which he was allowed to invite friends and breathe a sense of safety and acceptance not available outside her walls.

For my daughter, the experience came last year as a result of an administrative oversight after our move when she was allowed to perform academically by assumption of ability over predetermined restrictions. Her school saved her seat when paperwork dictated they shuffle her into another space. It was only after our daughter was offered an opportunity to thrive outside the limits of labels that we watched her excel along a trajectory of her own determination that exceeded expectations.

This is the truer gift of parenting children with special needs, the way in which we reframe understanding by potential; looking past the unspoken rules of fitting into social scripts for success to a more wholehearted place of belonging just as we are. It demands championing learning over testing, character over accomplishment; teaching children to save a space for one another with acceptance and appreciation.

I think we are on the verge of something remarkable and I’m saving a space for all of us to consider the difference between fitting in and belonging.