The Intersection of Hope and Fear

Of all the annual events in the lives of families, probably the one that elicits the biggest release of nervous energy is going back to school day.  I can think of no other event that happens on a yearly basis where hope and fear are so juxtaposed.   The beginning of the school year for a family is something like Columbus casting off from the pier, turning his ships west, and heading out into the great unknown.  What will you find?  What will happen?  Will you find a shortcut to India and the Far East?  Or will you get swallowed up by one of the great sea monsters believed to inhabit the seas beyond the edge of the map? Or will you wind up somewhere else, on some new land that you did not know existed?

    

The start of school is always accompanied by hope.  Education provides the opportunity for success.  Education represents growth and positive change for most of us.  It is the pathway to the bright future.   School is the place where our children meet most of their friends.  In many ways, for families, schools are the central educational and social node for their children for nine months every year.  That school should represent hope and education and should be valued is a mindset that we try to inculcate into our children.

    

The start of school, however, also means fear for families.  Each year is a trip into the unknown.  Each year brings new teachers, new peers, new parents to meet, new educational demands. Will my child successfully navigate these new things or not?  You can hope, but cannot be sure until the days begin to roll by and homework and grades and responses from your children and from the school start to roll in.  Until the new becomes familiar, that fear will stay in place.  The bottom line is that the start of school also represents a huge dose of change into our lives.  Is the year a beginning of an amazing journey, or is it the beginning of a trip into the heart of darkness?  None of us really know that first day.  All we can do is fret about the changes and newness while being hopeful about the potential of what lay ahead.

      

While all of us have experienced this, I believe that no group experiences it more strongly than those families sending their child off to school for the first time.  The arrival of that day is something akin to being hit by one of Zeus’s lightning bolts from Olympus.  As a parent you are now sending that child who you have nurtured and cared for and protected out into the wild on their own.  Further, there is nothing you can do to stop this.  It is an inexorable change, charged to the highest levels with hope and fear for mom and dad.  In many ways, this day can be the most terrifying of all the ‘normal’ days that occur as a parent.   No matter how you prepare for it, the realization is there that you are sending your young child out and into the care of virtual strangers and you are at their mercy.   But you send the child because you must.

      

As the years go by and this annual drama plays itself out again and again, the hope eventually outdistances the fear.  As a family you become comfortable with the schools and realize your child will not suffer through tortures or cruelties that would make Torquemada’s Inquisition look like a circus.  As a family you come to accept that your child is seeing benefits of an education and the folks at the school are, for the most part, really good people who care.  Over time, that hope grows and the fears subside.  Even so, these feelings about the first day never go away completely.   Even when your child is no longer really a child, but is away as a young adult at college, there is still the excitement brought on by hope, coupled with the nervous energy brought on by the fear of the unknown.

      

Embrace the excitement.  Embrace the hope.  Embrace the fear.  The truth is that these feelings reflect much of what makes us human.  These feelings are a large part of what lets us know we are alive.  Hopefully everyone got through that first day successfully.  Hopefully everyone is now back and hard at work, learning, exploring, and growing.  That is school and it is also life.  Welcome back!

Squeezed

This was a very interesting summer for me.  Ian continues to grow more and more into a mature, responsible adult.  I’m still Dad, and still am involved, but his level of independence continues to grow.  Ian’s college grades are good; he has a 3.25 overall GPA, and about 3.9 in his major field.  He has about another year in this program and he will be done with his A.S. degree.  We have also been looking at four year colleges where Ian can go to complete a B.S. degree.  We visited Lenoir-Rhyne University, and have plans to go see others.  I know that 10 years ago, I did not know that we would get here.  The hope was there, but so was the dread that such dreams would not come true.  And Ian REALLY wants to find a college that does not involve commuting from home, but has a dorm involved.  I am so happy about that – it is normal and it means he wants his independence.

  

Unfortunately, my father has had another stroke.  At this point, he won’t be going home.  Instead, my mother has finally accepted the need to move into an assisted living facility where they can be together.  She, with some help, has found a place where they can still have an apartment, but Dad will have access to the services and supports he will need.  This, however, has not been an easy process.  It has involved me, my sister, one of my uncles and an aunt.  Talking and talking and talking to my mother about the need to accept change, and the need to understand that there are certain realities in her and my father’s life that need to be accepted.  It has been something of an ongoing intervention.  

    

We seem to have hit that point where, while having a child with disabilities who is moving out of and away from the need for guidance and support, we now have a set of parents where they need more support and guidance from me and from my sister.  The parent – child roles here are well on their way to being reversed.  My guess is that this will be a permanent new dynamic in my family’s life.  

   

I’ve seen this dynamic happen to other families.  Sometimes it is in families that have children with special needs, and sometimes it isn’t, but it certainly adds to the stress levels in the family.  I guess I’m now part of that ‘tweener group of adults who still have kids to worry about but also need to be worrying about their parents as well.  

    

Where do we go from here?  Really, we just keep moving forward.  My wife and I watch with pride and relief as our son continues on his path toward an independent adulthood.  We also hold our breath watching how things progress with my parents.  We all know the end game for my father – really for all of us at some point in time – but we aren’t really sure what path he will follow in this particular journey.  Will it be quick, or a slow series of steps of decline?   The larger question in many ways to us is how will my mother deal with all this, and how will we be helping her through this process?  Again, multiple paths are available.  Will she become strong and step up, finding that strength in herself, or will she be weighed down by the stress and changes?  We don’t know yet.  We do know that we will be there somehow to help her through.

The Fox That Owns the Place

Ian and I have been back from Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks for less than a week now.  We spent 3 days in Grand Teton and a week in Yellowstone.  In a change from our normal routine and with her principal’s permission, my wife, Sidney, went with us for the first five days.  Then we got her on her flight out of Bozeman, MT and Ian and I continued on to Yellowstone’s northern range.   Yellowstone is a place I have fallen in love with.  Ian enjoys it immensely as does Sidney.  But the second half of this trip was our ‘man’ trip, with just Ian and me. 

Yellowstone is one of those places of constant change, where one visit will be completely different from the next.  We’ve seen 80 degree days and we’ve seen snow.  We’ve seen bright sunshine that leaves you in your shirt sleeves, or cold rain with strong winds that even with gloves and coats leaves you trying to find just a little more warmth.  That is a large part of what I think we love about the place.  No two days are ever the same.

We did some of our usual things – we took a whitewater trip on the Yellowstone River one day, and we spent a bit of time on horseback with a guide.  We were again far enough out that it was just the 3 of us and the horses.  No other people.  But there were plenty of animals.   This year was a big year for moose and for grizzlies, as well as black bear.  The wolves were not as present – we only saw one this visit.  And of course the elk, bison, bighorn, and mule deer were very visible throughout the trip.

But there was one animal that we saw that made the biggest impression on us.  In some ways this critter reminded me of my son.  It was a little fox, and he was missing about a third of his tail.  At some point, he had some bad fortune – a run in with a larger predator maybe – and had a significant segment of what should have been a big bushy tail missing. 

This fox was not in the field or on a hill.  Instead, he was walking right down the middle of the oncoming lane of traffic on the road between Mammoth and Tower Junction in Yellowstone.  He also had a small traffic jam behind him.  The first car in line was a massive white pickup truck – you know – the kind with the dual wheels in the back.  The whole mass of this parade was moving at about 3 miles an hour.  Luckily, there was no one behind us, so we stopped and watched.  As the fox passed us, he actually looked over at us.  I would swear that he had an expression on his face that was half humorous and half self-assurance.  We watched as this parade continued, fox in the lead, for about the next quarter mile, where everyone disappeared over a hill, still moving at about 3 miles an hour.  That night at dinner, we were in hysterics laughing at the sight of this fox.  Ian then went on to describe it to the waitress, who was about his age, and had her laughing, too.

Later that night, as I was lying awake in bed and thinking about the day, it really hit me how much that fox reminded me of Ian.  Despite whatever that fox had been through to cost him his tail, he seemed to be enjoying himself.  Hmm, who do I know that has that kind of mindset?  It certainly isn’t me.  I’m too dour.  But Ian seems to find humor in almost everything, and doesn’t seem to let the things he has to deal with get to him.  But that fox definitely seemed to know what it was doing and where it was trying to go, and it wasn’t going to let something like a big pickup truck deter him from his goal.  Hmm, again, sounds like Ian.  After having one of my, ‘son, are you studying enough?’ lectures all planned, because I was waiting for bad grades to arrive from the college after keeping my mouth shut all semester and just watching what I thought might have been an academic train wreck approaching, I never got to use that lecture.  Ian, I think, knew what had been coming.  When he presented semester grades of all ‘A’s to me, I did my impression of a fish out of water, and I got the same look from him that about two weeks later I got from that fox.

That expression told me that he knew exactly what he was doing.  Disabilities or not, he has a plan and is following it.  Just as that fox was not going to move for that line of traffic, Ian is chugging down his own road, keeping in his lane and doing what he needs to do to get where he wants to go.   That look was also took another one of those steps to make me reevaluate Ian.  He is an adult (I’ve known this for a while – it just is hard to accept in my role as dad).  While he still asks for guidance at times, he is able to make those adult decisions.   He needs me less than he ever has.  This is a hard realization. Not bad a bad realization, but just hard one.  I now keep that picture of the fox on my computer, so that when I start feeling the need to go into helicopter mode and hover, I can pull it up and look at that fox’s expression and think about that day.  It reminds me that the time for hovering is long past.  It also helps me remember that Ian has a plan about where he is going, and he is in control of that plan, not me. 

Homework for All

Several things have happened over the past month or so that kind of tickled the need for this particular post.  I was working in a district with some professionals who really have not had much experience with children with disabilities, but who very much want to learn.  Specifically, we were talking about deafness, and the conversation turned to understanding more about the impacts on families and about some of the social issues and concerns that come into play for the kids as they get older.  The conversation progressed, and eventually arrived at a time when I had to leave and move on to my next stop on that trip.  I told them that I was going to give them ‘homework’.  Basically 2 movies that I think, while not being perfect, give a good picture of a number of these topics.

About 2 weeks ago, my son asked me if we could request a movie on Netflix that he wanted to see.  It was a movie I had never heard of before, but told him that it was not a problem, to go ahead and add it and move it to the top of the queue, which he did.

The more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I think most folks who work with kids with disabilities or their families (not just deafness or blindness, but kids with any disability) should take the time to watch the 3 movies that I’m going to mention.

The first movie is “Children of a Lesser God”.  It is a good look at some of the conflicts between ideologies that can and often exist between the deaf and hearing worlds’ perspectives.  

The second movie is one that I have a really hard time watching.  I’ve seen all of it, but never in one sitting.  I have to walk away from the movie, and then come back later to see a little more, and repeat the process until it is done.  It is “Mr. Holland’s Opus”.  Most of the articles you read about it deal with Richard Dreyfuss and his life as a music teacher.  For me (and for many parents) it is about his role as a father of a child who is deaf, trying to come to grips with everything that means, and find a way to deal with it.  So many fathers and families go through these same issues.  If you have spent any time in the disability world and not picked up on this, then we really need to have a conversation.  Again, this movie is very hard for me to watch.  It is one that gets into a place inside me that I keep locked and barricaded and this movie tries to force it open.  Truth be told, I think that all of us who are dads of kids with special needs have this place inside of us, and often our ability to function depends on keeping this vault closed.  What we put into it, and how large it is, varies from father to father, but it is there.  For me, this movie tries to dynamite that vault open. 

The third movie is the one I had never heard of until Ian asked if we could get it.  That movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis.  It is called “My Left Foot”.  It is actually a true story, and is based on the autobiography of a man named Christy Brown, who was born in 1932 in Dublin, Ireland.  Brown was born with cerebral palsy and initially his family was told that he had limited mental capacities at best and probably should be committed.  Instead the family raised him at home.  The title comes from the fact that the only limb he had real control over was his left leg.  Without going into all the details that make the movie worth watching, suffice it to say he became a successful artist, writer, and poet.  He published a number of books and three collections of poetry during his life.   It is a movie worth watching simply because everyone, professionals and parents alike, need to be reminded of the potential of the individual, and the need to look beyond a diagnosis and see the individual.