Keeping It Real

In almost two years and a lot of infrequent postings, I've shared a fair amount.  I'm no Mary Poppins, but I've mostly shared the lighter side of things.  The victories.  The lessons learned.  The occasional righteous indignation.

I suppose that's less than honest of me.  The truth is, no matter how much I love my kids, some days suck.  Badly.  Today is one of them.

Brandon will move up to middle school this coming fall.  In another world, tomorrow would have been graduation day.  We should have been marking this momentous occasion all year long, as an elementary school senior, with a senior t-shirt and autograph book and yearbook, with a senior trip.  It should be a time for excitement and an awareness of a major milestone achieved.  Today I should have been making sure that cap, gown, and camera are all ready.  

Instead, today I got a phone call that my son bit one of his classmates.  That no matter what cool stuff was going on all day (a trip to a park, ice cream, a school end of year celebration), he could only focus on a set of bird print outs he had brought in and wanted cut out for him.  Today I got a reminder that I've been having a year long battle with his school simply to have him moved up to the upper school classroom in the fall in the first place.  They thought he should stay in the lower school.  I maintained that no matter what they thought, he is certainly aware of what being left back is.  You can sugar coat it any which way - that the classrooms are ungraded and therefore it's not the same thing - but he will understand that his friends moved on, he didn't, and that it amounts to being left back.  Eventually my perspective won.  My perspective doesn't get to walk down an aisle and celebrate that accomplishment.  

I know it's not polite in some autism circles to talk about the hard.  I call bullshit.  I fully understand - and believe it to be true - that most of the hard is not directly autism.  Autism doesn't cause there to be a dearth of good schooling options for kids on the spectrum - bureaucracy does that.  Bureaucracy caused the best choice we could make for Brandon to be a self-contained school with ungraded classrooms that go all the way up through middle school.  Bureaucracy and the paucity of appropriate high school placements may cause us to move Brandon earlier than that, causing us to once again be robbed of a graduation.  Of what for an NT child would be a milestone marked by ceremony.  As a parent, for me, that's hard to swallow.  I shouldn't - and don't - blame any of this on my son or on autism.  But I won't claim that it isn't hard and it doesn't suck.  And I should be allowed to talk about it.  

I realize this pity party is all mine.  My son is just fine with how his day went, biting the classmate notwithstanding.  That's as it should be.  He doesn't need to be aware that I spent all year fighting for his right to move on to middle school.  Or that I'm acutely aware that I will not be at a graduation tomorrow.  These are my fights.

But the truth is, some days suck.  Badly.  Today is one of them.