Finding the Right Words for a Special Grad
Jay Black
It’s always the same story, isn’t it?
Your baby is born, and they hand him to you at the hospital, like you’re supposed to know what to do with him. You look at the nurse in horror. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, there’s been some mistake. You’ve only shown me how to swaddle him a few times, surely there’s more to it than this? Please don’t tell me that they give parents less training than they give you during the orientation talk before you play a round of Laser Tag!”
But you take the kid home, and somehow, unlike all of the plants you ever owned, he survives and starts to grow. Soon enough he’s stumbling around your house like a college freshman on the way home from a kegger, throwing his little body around like it were indestructible.
It’s not that easy, though. There’s always an emergency, and, while the specifics are different for all of us, the feeling of an entire Amish community churning butter inside your stomach is about the same for every parent. What’s wrong and how do we fix this?!
In our case, the little guy wasn’t talking. It wasn’t long before he was diagnosed with moderate-to-severe apraxia, which meant that his tongue didn’t quite connect to his brain. It’s branded into my memory, right next to, “Luke … I am your father!” and the first time my wife smiled back at me. Then, the neurologist, looking over the test results, saying, in a thick Hungarian accent, “You want to know if the bus is just late? … Or if it’s not coming, yes?”
The bus was late, but it came. We took him to Rizza Miro & Associates, experts in apraxia here in South Jersey (which is part of the reason we live here and pay these taxes). Sure, we’d live like kings if we moved somewhere smaller and less bustling, but who wants to wait for Doc Hollywood’s car to break down before we can get adequate medical care?
He was talking by the time he was 5 years old. We were asking him to shut up when he was 5 years and one day old. It was beautiful.
Then it’s the first day of school, and you’re out waiting for the bus with him, and his tiny hand is in yours, and his backpack looks so big that you wonder if he’s going to Beeler Elementary School or on a seven-day hike in Nicaragua with the Army Rangers. And you say, “Welp, my parents only waited with me on the first day of school, so that’s all you get,” but he asks you the next day if you’ll walk him again. So you agree, but you’re firm that you’ll only walk him to the bus stop … every day going forward until the end of eighth grade.
You have to put your foot down somewhere, right?
And then he does something without you. Plays a sport, sings a song, writes a poem, something that he did, on his own. For my son, it was getting the lead in the eighth-grade musical—Shrek—my family’s long lineage of galumphing, oversized-feet and pumpkin-sized heads finally becoming an asset.
You sit and watch in awe, because it was only 10 or 15 seconds ago that he was a nine-pound baby who slept 20 hours a day and didn’t even know which one was Laverne and which one was Shirley! Yet there he is, bounding around the stage, singing and dancing, and remembering all the lines of an entire musical.
Your wife catches you then, big fat tears tumbling down your face like you’re 6 years old and E.T. just touched Elliott’s forehead and said, “I’ll be right here.” She laughs, and you say what you’ll say every time she catches you blubbering at every single one of his performances: “HE COULDN’T TALK UNTIL HE WAS 5!”
And then it’s off to high school, and the worry shifts from whether or not he’ll eat all the veggies you packed in his lunch to, “Gee, I hope he doesn’t do anything that someone makes a TV movie out of one day!” The stakes get bigger, the permanent record becomes permanent-er, and the Amish have moved from butter churning to an actual barn raising in your belly.
But … he makes it through. Four years. First love, first heartache, first time driving an actual car without you there (ARE THE AMISH LAUNCHING A SPACE SHUTTLE IN THERE, TOO!?!).
And now, if you’re like me, and your firstborn is actually putting on a cap and gown and graduating from high school, you understand exactly the words your parents said when you told them you were having a kid: “Buckle Up.”
All that’s left to say is: Congratulations, Keane, you did it!
Until college. In two months.
