new page
I looked pretty bad, on paper, that’s my thought, tears clinging to the bottom edge of my jaw like dew drops on a limb, Adam’s chilly fingers reaching for my ear, saying, love love love, asking tentatively, in his silent, tender way, if I’m okay.
But listen, I’m actually better than okay today.
I glance over my left shoulder, merging into the interstate rush on the way to school in a blur of joy, because I have just found out that Adam has earned his high school diploma, and let me tell you: it isn’t just a piece of paper.
Sometime in the late 1800’s, right around the time paper manufacturing boomed, when advertising on paper began to be a thing, the idiom looks good on paper popped up in the English language and came to refer to something that seems, at least on paper, to be a really good thing, but maybe turns out not to be as good as expected. Funny that, because you can hold a piece of paper in your hand and miss the tree, the whole pulped up life, that preceded it. Anyway, over time, English speakers extended the use of the idiom and turned it into a cautionary tale, applying it to proposals and plans and even people.
Well, he looks good on paper, but we’ll see.
The thing is: People are oaks, not advertisements.
It has been our experience, over the last twenty years, that neurodivergence creates quite a paper trail, and one that flips that idiom completely upside down.
From the very beginning, well before any diagnosis, parents of neurodivergent babies write paragraphs on diagnostic surveys about all the ways their little ones deviate from standards regarding what to expect. Then the diagnoses come, with weighty, stapled booklets (actual paper ones, at least back when we started out) of reports, into which doctors and psychologists type extensive notes about our children and their unusual quirks and weaknesses—weak muscle tone, weak social development, weak motor skills, weak intelligence, weak or absent speech, well, according to a battery of standardized tests. In countless meetings, professional people, albeit always with the intention to help, gravely overview reams more, pointing to the numerical data and their written observations, always carefully avoiding any predictions of any kind regarding potential for the future.
This is the summary of the written record: Things look bad, really very bad.
An encouraging friend of mine once told me that all of us have quirks and weaknesses and deficits, it’s just that not all of us have them written down on paper. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, remembering something the apostle Paul wrote, that there actually once was a written record of my offenses, my weaknesses, my failures, my debts, but that this Christ “set aside, nailing it to the cross.” Or, in other words, He absorbed it into his own body and canceled it. Things were heavy binder-bound volumes of bad for me on paper, but He allowed Himself to be pulped up to produce a clean, new page.
In a lifetime of parenting exceptional people, we parents tear our thighs off thousands of those tight little plastic kindergarten-colored chairs, leaving behind layers of our skin in meetings, heading for home with our arms full of papers, feeling reasonably overwhelmed and dismal, chagrined, even, as if this data, which flies in the face of our own perceptions of our children, represents personal failure. I remember leaving one early meeting about Adam carrying a four-inch binder, benevolently gifted me like a welcome packet, mostly empty (because it was so large) but full of pre-printed tabs, ready to receive future evaluations and therapy plans, all of which would for years recount, albeit with an effort toward progress, the multitudinous conviction that my son is both abnormal and deficient. We filled that binder and moved on to others.
I used to come away from those meetings and stuff all the papers into a drawer in my file cabinet, unwilling to look at them for a while, complaining out loud that the reports contained so little acknowledgement of progress and nothing of Adam’s potential. All that paper played right into my very human tendency to focus on the ‘not enough,’ instead of the truth of our blessings, the limitations rather than the undeniable abundance, and so, I became somewhat defiant about the record being written, whatever the good intentions, about my son. I began to record grace upon grace upon grace, as a deliberate effort to overwhelm the scales.
Wait, let me flip the page, because—
Two of Adam’s teachers, our friends, are on the phone now, their voices filling the car, saying, we thought this was worth a call, and me, well, my mama eyes glisten happy because we couldn’t be sure that my brilliant autistic son could pass the standardized tests required by the state for the conferral of a diploma. He had stumbled for a while–grieved, you could say, if necessary, for a short time–over the language comprehension portion of the test, not because he doesn’t comprehend, but because he has a difficult time retrieving from his mind the words he knows. But then, there are Teachers who see beyond the standard and normative, beyond the unforgiving assessments, past coping strategies and apraxia, resourceful and creative teachers with the insight that human beings are so much more than what can be seen on the surface.
There are teachers who will sacrifice themselves to write a different story.
At first, I can only just say watery bits of things in response to this news, words like wonderful and amazing, quavering phrases like so so good.
Those tears I mentioned swell and fall from my chin, and Adam reaches over to smear them away with his fingers. He never has been able to stand seeing anyone cry.
“Adam, you did so good,” I find my voice enough to say, flashing him a grin, because I can feel his gentle body wanting to curl protectively around my vulnerability.
“Oh,” he says, gushing instant relief, but I can tell, glancing his way as we come to a stop, that he’s not exactly sure what he did that was so good.
It makes little difference to Adam whether the paper in his hand when he graduates says certificate of completion or diploma, but it matters to those of us who love him, because all those papers forever listing Adam’s deficiencies never meant much at all to us. We have only ever seen our son—brother, grandson, nephew, student, friend, whom we love, like a tree bearing fruit in season, the towering life, grand and gentle and kind and able, and here at the end of all of Adam’s years in school, it feels like just about time for a new page, one that testifies to what we’ve always seen and known and believed, one that cancels all the others.
