A Reason to Celebrate

My oldest child graduated yesterday. The mother behind me in the stands cried (a lot). I could relate to the tears, but I also couldn’t be more happy for graduation. I do admit that I cried too (briefly) when the speaker recognized two students that didn’t make it to graduation. There is no worse thought than losing a child in this life. It’s paralyzing to me and incredibly sad to think there are parents in this world who have felt that loss. I can’t imagine.

 

I haven’t shared a lot about my parenting journey with my oldest child. It has been an incredible 18+ years of dancing in delight and wading through sorrow. In some ways, I feel like this child and I have parented each other. We have grown up together, experiencing life, and learning through each other's eyes.

I’m just going to break the ice and say that HE has become one of my best friends and something like a third parent to my other children. As the oldest child being raised by a single mother, my son has grown into a caring and supportive older sibling and friend to his brother and sisters. He can reach them in ways that I am unable to and has the ability to speak some sense into them when mom is just so uncool.

Spoiler alert: moms are so uncool, especially from children’s ages of about mmmm…. 9-13/14, give or take a decade or so.

Our family has grown to be warm, fun, accepting and inviting, but it was at times very toxic and unhealthy. We have seen a lot of struggles and overcome many challenges. And here we are, 18+ years later, having learned how to responsibly be ourselves while maintaining an environment where each family member's needs are acknowledged and accepted with grace and sometimes a lot of humor.

Life isn’t always easy. For my family we have walked through marriage, separations, divorce, mental health crises, anxiety, depression, oppression, suicidal ideation, bad parenting strategies, breaking chains of abuse, misunderstandings, ptsd, therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapy, sensory processing issues, adjustment problems, school changes, moving, bullying, financial hardships, heartbreaks, eating disorders, co-parenting. You get the idea.

My goal with raising this child has been to just make it through to graduation. There were many days where that seemed so far out of reach, and I barely held onto hope. In those times, it seemed impossible to be thinking that of my little one who had been reading since age three. He has always been exceptionally gifted with a creative and inquiring mind, receptive to learning and understanding, but during his darkest days of struggle that inquisitive sparkle was nowhere to be seen in his eyes.

It was during that time that my parenting strategy drastically changed from pushing my child to be his best to learning what he needed from me. What he needed was to have a voice, to be protected, accepted, and given a lot of room to make mistakes and grow. I can imagine that being the oldest, and transgender, with sensory processing and adjustment disorders, and also self admittedly on the autism spectrum doesn’t make life easy.

But my son, he has persevered through challenges that I thought would break us. We did it together. I am so incredibly proud of him for the creative, thoughtful, observant, articulate, and compassionate individual he is turning out to be. He knows how to advocate for himself and is the first to show up for his friends. He is an incredible individual and I am so proud of who has become. I look forward to watching him develop more fully into a self aware individual who will define and hopefully find what success looks like in his own life.

Graduation was yesterday. I celebrate that we made it. And I rejoice that we still have so far to go.