Graduation?

Yesterday was a day that I will remember for a long time. It was filled with hoopla and giddiness and hope and excitement and nervousness and sadness and emptiness. Sadness and emptiness? Yes. Why? Because it was graduation.

I suppose you're thinking that I must be talking about the sadness and emptiness of watching your "baby" grow up and get ready to move on. Nope, not even close. It's a sadness and emptiness I had not expected. Sad and empty because the gaps between my daughter and her typical peers were magnified to such a degree that they hit me between the eyes once again.

While most of the kids and their parents are talking about heading off to college or the military or to get a job, we are talking about MANY of the same things we talked about when she started school - who will take care of her, how can we get her involved in such and such, what doctor's visits do we have coming up, etc.

It was actually hard to go through the ceremony. I really could not wait to get out of there. I wanted to leave because I didn't like the magnifying glass that showed so clearly all of the things my daughter was NOT going to do.

(I should point out that the amount of cheering from students and the audience was actually the loudest overall for the students in special ed. That was one positive I took away from the ceremony.)



Having waited two months to post this, I reviewed it to see if the emotions were still there or if it was an "in the moment" thing. Sadly, they're still there. The graduation ceremony is painful to think about.

On a more positive note, we did have a celebration for Vicki in mid July. About 100 people came and congratulated her. It was a special day for her and as my wife said, "it was a day to celebrate her life."

One of the things you become good at when you have a child with a disability is adapting things. We've adapted toys and games and equipment and now, we've adapted graduation. For Vicki, graduation was less about making it through 4 years of credit based classes and more about merely making it through. Sometimes even enduring the days of not wanting to be at school or feeling poorly or not feeling like she was a part of the larger picture of Andover High School. Graduation was merely a marker. A marker that says "you've made it this far, keep going."