No one’s perfect. We screw up all the time, even if no one else witnesses it, and even if we refuse to acknowledge it.
We’ve all let someone down at some point in our lives, and when we let ourselves down, it takes guts not to blame it one someone or something else and acknowledge that we screwed up and will try harder next time to never repeat the mistake. And then sometimes in life we exceed our expectations of ourselves, of someone else, or perhaps we blow the mind of another with what we were capable of, and everyone learns something valuable.
Who we are, our relationships, and what we do in this life – the choices, the actions, the reactions – are complicated and their degree of imperfectness depends on our level of maturity at the time.
There certainly are ample opportunities in life to mess up, but none affect me more, none hit me harder, than when I screw up as a parent. My imperfection as a parent is my sensitive spot. I can misspell a name in one of my articles or get the date wrong reporting on a ‘pubic’ meeting instead of a public meeting, and I can sigh and suck it up and remember next time to use the Command F function on my MacBook to search for the word ‘pubic’ before posting.
But when you love someone as much as you love your child, letting them down is the worst. Even in those instances when my son isn’t even aware that I’ve let him down, I’m crushed for him. I take it hard – hard enough sometimes to pull the car over to the Mattapoisett Diner parking lot and give it a good cry like I did back on February 9 on my way home from the office.
It was the day my 14-year-old son was scheduled to be interviewed by Bristol Aggie as part of the admissions process to get into the agricultural vocational high school.
My boy is Autistic, and in every imaginably wonderful way. A delight, and doesn’t everyone who knows him know it? And he loves horses. So when we attended the Bristol Aggie open house last year and then again for a smaller-scale tour back in early February, there was no hiding the excitement in his face. That crooked smile, wide fixated eyes that gleamed watching the students riding the horses in the arena.… It was clear that he wanted to be them.
But is this a good fit for him? Would he have the academic supports he needs? Would he fit in? Would he be happy in a new environment, with new classmates, with new expectations? How would he perform academically in such a highly competitive structure? Would he even get in?
As we walked back from the large animal science section of the bucolic campus during our second tour, I noticed the sheep had just lambed; their wee little babies jumped about with a cuteness that can kill. They frolicked carefree in their new existence, hopping, climbing onto the backs of their mothers and then jumping off and back on again, then stopped to suckle wildly, then with seeming attitude jumped back up again, assertive in their fresh freedom. It was so darned cute I found myself tearing up. I welled up in my eyes. With tears! Please, nobody notice my irrational emotional response to the wholesome scene, I thought, my tense mouth already turning down. I tore a tissue out from my coat pocket and stuffed it back in along with my feelings.
On the ride home, I had doubts about the placement while the boy next to me smiled, enthusiasm intact along with his delightful dreaming of life as a student at Bristol Aggie. But there was work to be done, real effort. He needs letters of recommendation and preparation for his interview, an experience he had never been exposed to. He would be asked questions that quite possibly no one had ever asked him. And I, being his mother and knowing most things about him, haven’t needed to ask him what his interests are (ding, ding, ding, railroad crossings, bridges, VHS tapes, and classical music, and of course, horses) or how one of his teachers would describe him, or what strategies he employs when faced with a challenge. He would need practice with these questions, prepared answers, and a solid understanding of the importance of conveying these ideas in that kind of setting.
I wondered if it was worth the effort since he probably wouldn’t be accepted into the school – not for academic underperformance or lack of interest, but for no other reason than the fact that his verbal communication skills are limited, one of the ways autism can make life on this planet more challenging.
After we got home, I took to the sofa to contemplate my feelings and self-examine. I pondered the aforementioned lamb hysteria, breaking it down. What was the root of those feelings? Where did that crying-over-the-cute-little-lambs thing come from? Sometimes the self needs time to think about it, but sometimes it just answers right away.
“Your baby is going into high school and you’re sad because you can no longer protect him, nurse him, keep him close to you. He’s not your baby anymore and you’re having a hard time letting go.”
Tears. Realization and tears.
Conclusion: this is not about Diego and his ability to “make it,” either into or at Bristol Aggie. It’s about me and my fears, so who am I to make that decision for him? Who am I to say he can’t go to Bristol Aggie?
I wasn’t going to ‘fail’ him on his behalf and without his consent. He deserved the chance to try, unencumbered by my fears.
So we went for it. We got three letters of recommendation, and it was touching to read them clearly written from the heart with a sincere fondness for the boy. But as the interview day approached, I bit my inner lip with anxiety and doubt, and I recoiled from the thought of not being able to sit with him and support him if he faltered. We practiced the likely questions, and getting him to answer was akin to that pulling teeth analogy. I couldn’t get the clear articulate answers out of him, and he fought against the mock interviews. He wanted nothing to do with them and had no interest in practicing for an interview. With a helplessness I couldn’t bear, the night before the big day I helped him type out some short notes to help him remember some of the key aspects of who he is, answers to fall back on if he was to blank out.
He went to school, and I went to work. I worried about him and how he would feel if he got too nervous, if he didn’t know the answer, if he had a hard time formulating his thoughts into words. It made me sick to think about how he might just bomb that interview and walk out of it knowing that he did. And how would he feel after I told him it would be fine and he’d do well before walking into school that morning, only to return home to tell me that I had lied – it didn’t go fine, he didn’t do well.
I couldn’t wait to find out. I emailed the guidance counselor. I told her I was dying to know how the interview went. “My heart’s in knots,” I wrote. Did he bomb it, I asked her. How did he do?
I got the response while already clicking on my seatbelt in the car to leave work for that day, just about to pull out of the parking lot. I stopped. I braced myself. I read the email. I smiled.
“He did AWESOME!” (in all caps) she replied. “He was just adorable, very well spoken, polite, and used his prompts well.”
She said the interviewer praised him for coming in so prepared, “and I could tell she really enjoyed talking with him.”
“Fingers crossed,” she wrote, “I think it would be a good fit for him!”
My heart soared. I drove off feeling so excited, so relieved, so … suddenly and excruciatingly ashamed of myself.
I pulled over. I had to face it. As his mother, I had let my son down.
As a parent of an Autistic child, my fear is that the world will view him a certain way as a result of being labeled Autistic. I feel enraged thinking about a world that will likely underestimate my child, limit his opportunities for contribution and fulfillment because he’s been labeled Autistic, and assume he can’t do it – which is exactly what I, Mom, just did to him.
If I am his mother and I myself unfairly underestimated his potential, how can I expect the world to embrace him, accept him, lift him up as high as he can go when I myself had failed to? I’m supposed to be that one person in the world who is supposed to believe in him and everything he wants to do, support him, and push him towards his dreams knowing that there is at least one person in the world who thinks he is perfect, invincible, incapable of failing. So what happened? How could I let my fear hijack that moment and turn me into exactly what I feared most for my boy?
He doesn’t yet know what I’ve done, and when he one day reads this I hope that he understands and forgives me, knowing that I am self-aware of my failure and that I have learned from my mistake.
Before I pulled back onto the road, I wiped my face dry and vowed to the Universe: “I will never ever underestimate that boy again. Never ever.”
I’ve learned a lot about myself in this life as your mom, Diego, and there has been no greater teacher than you, which is why I have learned my lesson to never again underestimate you, and which is why, I hope, one day the world will learn it, too.