graduation day
Tuesday morning, I run into the newborn sun, gold and yet untarnished.
I wake early, get out while the breeze rushes cool. I think of Riley, breathing my heart to God, whispering thanks. 5th grade graduation happens today, but I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. I know, it seems silly to feel so much about what seems like such a tiny milestone. But for special needs parents, there are no tiny steps.
In the last mile, I top a hill and run into nothing but sunlight, the rays wrapping gold around me, the light so bright I can see nothing else, so beautiful I can’t look away. And, overwhelmed by joy, I say to the lover of my soul,
“This is how you are, isn’t it?”
In His presence, by His grace, a dull-gray road becomes a sparkling, gold-paved street.
In the hallway at school, I see one of our teacher-friends, and she stops me with a hug. She asks me how I am, if I am excited about Summer and the beach. I nod, smiling, and then I say, “But Friday…”
She puts a hand on my arm. “I asked to leave my class Friday morning so I could go, so I could see Riley.” She mentions another teacher who has done the same, also because she wants to see Riley graduate.
“Mom, Dad, Kevin, and I will be crying, you know,” I say to her. “I will be the one with the full-sized tissue box in her lap.”
“You? What about us?” She shakes her head, one hand on her hip. “Honestly, I don’t know what we’re going to do without her here. She always knows just what to say, you know?”
I nod, swallowing hard.
I do know. I have witnessed this gift, have felt such awe over it. A friend has trouble loving–so much trouble that sometimes all of us wonder–and one day Riley says to them, matter-of-factly, out of the blue, the Spirit using her voice, “I know you love your family.” She does this thousands of times with simple honesty, without pretense or agendas or awkwardness, stunning me every time. And when she started school, she couldn’t speak.
“I saw her the other day, and I told her that I was going to miss her, I mean, really. really. miss.her,” this teacher says, still touching my arm. “And do you know what she said? She said, ‘I know. But it’s time for me to go on to middle school now.’ She’s ready for this. She is. But I don’t know if any of the rest of us are.”
Riley’s first teacher barely knew her.
At three, we enrolled Riley in a regular preschool. She needed a mat to sit on during circle time, and Mom and I sewed glittering letters in pastel on a rose-colored bath towel, back when I thought somehow if I just kept expecting the right things she’d grow into doing them. But Riley wandered the room, not making eye contact with anyone, unable to speak or understand or participate, little blonde curls bobbing tightly near her ears. Shortly after that, the school gently encouraged me to seek developmental evaluations, suggesting that we try half days at preschool instead of full ones until we knew more about what Riley needed.
I sat next to Kevin, across the table from two wonderful women—one a psychologist— who smiled gently and told me Riley had autism, and that she would need special services to help her make progress. At the time, Rain Man was everything I knew of that word, and I looked over at Riley, lining up plastic dinosaurs in a row, flapping her hands, and I kept hearing Dustin Hoffman say “Wapner at 4:30, Wapner at 4:30.”
They asked if we had questions, and my first one was this: “What will this mean for her future? Will she be independent? Will she be able to live on her own? Marry? Go to college?”
The women looked at each other briefly, clasping their hands in front of them, and then one of them said, “We have no answers to those questions. It’s all up to Riley. Time will tell.”
Then they told me that some autistic children require full-time assistance their entire lives, and then they told me about Temple Grandin and her PhD and the books she’s written and how this incredible autistic woman flys all over the country speaking to large groups. And I remember writing down the name of Dr. Grandin’s book Thinking in Pictures on the corner of Riley’s evaluation report, and thinking, “It isn’t up to Riley at all. It’s up to God. And this is faith, the not knowing. And if Temple Grandin can do it, so can Riley.”
Just weeks after Riley’s autism diagnosis, the week before Riley started full day, multi-disciplinary, speech and language-focused preschool for children on the Spectrum, I picked her up from the little preschool for the last time, folding her rose-colored towel up under my arm. I got choked up, wondering if Riley would understand that she’d not return here, wondering if she’d miss this teacher.
“I know Riley will miss being here,” I told the teacher, even though I wasn’t sure how much Riley understood or felt at all. I passed the teacher an index card with our address on it. “Please keep in touch.”
Years ago, my parents taught me that every teacher makes an impact, every teacher should be respected and appreciated. My mom kept in touch with every one of our teachers for years and still communicates with some of our very favorites.
“Okay,” the teacher said awkwardly, taking the card from my hand.
I felt the sting of new grief, the terrible truth of Riley’s challenges. I realized then that this teacher and Riley had made very little connection during all the weeks that had passed. She barely knew Riley, except as a lost, wandering, unreachable child who smelled like warmth and sweet summer. I had known, but had not wanted to accept how difficult and unreachable Riley was, how autism had locked her away from all of us. I used to rub peach lotion into Riley’s skin after every bath, knowing that smell is the sense for which we have the strongest memory, hoping perhaps it would encourage effort in my absence. And the one thing the teacher had said over and over, maybe the only hopeful thing, was that Riley always smelled so good.
I gave the teacher a bottle of the lotion as a goodbye, but it wasn’t until I handed her that address scrawled on an index card, when I saw nothing at all in her eyes, that I realized she’d miss the scent more than Riley. Knowing Riley took work back then, it took insisting and interrupting and blocking her way. It took more than a preschool teacher could offer in a mainstream classroom, with a crowd of three year-olds who jostled for attention, grabbing affection with chubby fingers and wide eyes and innocently clipped phrases. Riley had been the satellite no one knew how to engage, a distraction and an interruption rather than a part. They felt sad for her, but when we left I saw more relief than sadness, and this reality smacked hard, right where the word autism had left its bruise.
Just last week, I found a picture I took of Riley on her first day of kindergarten. She stands in between her new teacher and the classroom assistant, her hair cut into a short bob. That day, Riley fought to get free, her movement blurring her face and body in the photograph, but it’s clear enough to see the lost look in her eyes, the apprehension tensing her features. She looks at no one directly, not me, not them.
The first month of kindergarten, Riley refused to speak, though by then—2 years since she started the preschool program, a year and half beyond her first words–she spoke and communicated more easily. Her teacher called me in one day, explaining over the phone that she’d tried everything and couldn’t get Riley to answer even the simplest question in the classroom. I stood in that classroom next to the chalk board and held Riley’s face in my hands so that she couldn’t look away and asked her to name the days of the week.
“Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,” she began, and her teacher sat down on the floor by the wall.
“Listen, I wanted to believe you,” she said to me, “but I promise she’s not said the first word since school started.”
“You’ve got to let her know you know what she can do,” I told the teacher privately. “You’ve got to insist.”
It wasn’t until the following year that Riley started elementary school where she attends now, where she’s spent the last six years. She started in a separate classroom for autistic students, unable to write her name in a straight, appropriately-sized line. I remember the boxes drawn on her paper, one for each letter, then the long rectangle, creating borders for her letters.
The teachers all remember how they worked to get Riley to talk to them, the way they’d stop her in the hall and say hello, waiting for her to respond, forcing her to look at them. Many of them remember meeting that locked-up, frightened little girl, all her frustration, all her rigid attachment to routine, the way she’d cry about every transition.
And the same teachers remember how she opened up to them, like a flower in the newborn light, gradually finding words, independence, ability, friends. Slowly, Riley grew beyond the walls of the structured classroom until she could learn among her neuro-typical peers, until she could sustain conversations, until she could be invited to sleepovers and laugh in a knot of girls who love her for her uniqueness.
Riley, this child once a lonely satellite, memorizes the yearbook so that she knows every teacher, every student by name. She stands out on the sidewalk in the mornings, wearing her orange safety-patrol vest, opening car doors, greeting everyone. She’s been the only student out there with the teachers for months now, and these teachers recently presented her with a card and a gift.
Riley showed it to me one day after school, and the first thing I said was, “Riley, I’m going to cry.”
She didn’t comment on my tears, just took the card out of my hands and said, “Here, let me read it to you. It says, ‘You’re every shade of wonderful…Thanks.'” She read five notes from five different teachers, each thanking her for her hard work in carpool, each telling her that they would miss her next year. I gulped back tears and turned my face to the window.
One day, Kevin dropped Riley off at school and one of these teachers stopped him to tell him how much she loves Riley, how proud she feels to know her. When Kevin told me about it later, he could barely speak.
“She just blesses other people,” he said to me, ” and she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.”
This morning, I’ll cry.
I’ll look at Riley on our way to school, her sitting there gorgeous and glowing in a dress for fifth grade graduation, and everything will go all blurry. And I’ll turn away so she doesn’t see. And I’ll sit beside Kevin and Mom and Dad and press tissues under my eyes while I watch her walk up on the stage in a white cap and gown, while she sings Look to the Future, while she smiles and waves and brightens when she sees us. She will ask me why I’m crying, and I will tell her that I am proud of her, so happy it floods my eyes.
But I’ll be thinking of that blonde girl with the glossy curls and the lost look in her eyes, the one frustration tugged from sleep during the wee hours of every morning, the one with no words, the one who couldn’t connect with the world. And I will be thinking of all the people who know her, all these teachers who love her, who will really, truly miss seeing her every day. And I will whisper to God,
How truly amazing, how faithful, how powerfully loving you are, that you do things just this way.
Because it’s the witness of His glory that leaves me breathless, that makes it nearly impossible for me to talk about her without tears.
We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. ~John 1:14
YHWH brings life out of dank, dark tombs; a Savior from a poor virgin living in a tiny town; a feast for a crowd from five loaves and two fish. He turns fishermen and tax collectors into disciples who will travel the world and be martyred for Christ. In His hands, the worst persecutor becomes the greatest evangelist, and the one who would write, “To live is Christ (Philippians 1:21).”
In His hands, a disconnected little girl without words becomes one who blesses by knowing everyone by name, by loving purely, by always knowing just what to say.
Loving Riley is a lot like running into the sun.
The hills take such hard work, and it’s all concrete and sweat and pushing to move every inch. But at the crest, all we can see is His glory wrapping everything in gold. It’s so magnificent we can see nothing else, and so beautiful we can’t look away.
