Letting Go

I just got back from the store, where I (and everyone else in suburbia, it seems) was stocking up on groceries for the week.  This time, though, I was also buying school supplies.  And even though they were somewhat silly, non-academic supplies in general (Ziplock bags? Paper plates? Shaving cream?  Are they having craft time or building some McGuyver-esque bomb?), I am feeling a bit sick to my stomach about it.

See, Linc starts school tomorrow.  Our little guy, the one I still refer to about a quarter of the time as "the baby," is packing up his tiny little backpack and checking in to his new classroom at 7:40am.  The paperwork is all filled out, he is officially enrolled as a student, his cubby has his name on it, and come tomorrow morning, the public school system is going to swallow up my sweet little man. 

That's the way it feels, anyway.  He's too sweet, too little, too innocent and unsuspecting to throw into the shark infested waters of public school.  How do we let him walk through the door knowing that in the coming years, if not this one, kids will make fun of him for being different?  For not talking or talking funny? 

Sometimes I think that if we were made of money, we could at least get him into one of those picturesque private schools, where everyone dresses alike and the walls are painted pleasant colors and perhaps the children are too cultured to bother tormenting others.  But then I remember that most of those idyllic, university style schools don't even accept children with special needs.  How else can they be so idyllic, with everyone looking so perfectly coifed and wonderfully alike?  Ok, I'm being mean.  I know they don't accept special needs children because that would require more work, a bigger staff, different accommodations and a whole host of other things that would in no way promote their picture perfect reputation or maintain their hefty-but-marketed-as-affordable-to-middle-class-folk price point.

So, how do we let him go?  How do we let him venture into the real world at three years and 3 days old?  Because it's the best thing we can do for him right now.  We are blessed to live in an age when children like Lincoln receive help from infancy.  Perhaps it is a kind of reparation from the days (not so long ago) when people with Down syndrome were institutionalized from birth, when parents were told that "these children" would never amount to anything and the best thing for everyone was to let them be raised by the state. 

And those children were dumped into asylums and left to wither like unwatered plants, not allowed to achieve anything or experience life, returning the kind of developmental results that reinforced the idea that people with Down syndrome are useless.  But, if you think about it, at what age would any child learn to walk sitting in a room under flickering fluorescent lights staring at a bunch of other immobile people?

Eventually a few people starting doing research on children with Down syndrome.  One university study found that children raised in a group home setting walked at an average age of two rather than the average age of seven seen in children raised in an institution.  How much better, people started to wonder, would these kids do raised in a home with a loving family and a little outside therapy to give them some direction and bit of a push?

In a few decades, the thinking shifted from institutions to special ed classes to in home therapy that would bridge into school based programs and eventually (hopefully) allow special needs children to enter mainstream classes with a few modifications.  Lincoln, thus, had a case worker, speech therapist and occupational therapist from the time that he was a month old.  Over time, when he was ready, he also got a physical therapist.  And we have seen the fruits of that intense approach, seen Linc thrive and improve visibly week by week.  We have watched him respond to the forceful direction of a therapist's hands with as much spark as he responds to an affectionate touch by someone he loves.  The best way to put it is that he is not unable to do things; he just needs a little extra help to accomplish them.  That also means, by the way, that Linc works so much harder to accomplish basic developmental steps than anyone we know.  Simply eating was exhausting for him as he was learning it.  A session of physical can leave him as wiped out as a few hours of rock climbing would make us.

There is no way for us to pretend that the extra help has not been hugely beneficial for Lincoln, or that he is ready to be cut free to figure it out on his own, with only his completely untrained parents to guide him.  And now that he has turned three, the in home therapies stop and the responsibility of challenging and cultivating Linc falls on the school system.  Don't get me wrong, I am grateful beyond words that these options exist for our son and others like him.  In the world we live in, it is fairly amazing that this complex system of aid exists for a section of the population still commonly thought of as being incapable of most skills considered valuable to society.  I am grateful that humanity shines through the bureaucracy on this one and that our biggest problem tonight is that tomorrow we have to hand our son over to those better trained to help him for four hours a day.

So, we'll let him go with that sick feeling in our stomachs, knowing that the good it will do him will be tempered with all the bad the world can throw at him.  Praying that the good will outweigh the rest, praying that we can let go of his hand when we get to the door.  And praying that one day he will know that as hard as he worked to reach all of his goals, we sometimes had to work just as hard to get out of his way and just let him run.