This is a bittersweet day in my home today, as my family will be taking a final trip to a place that has become very comfortable and familiar to us. Well, I should probably correct myself when I say it is comfortable, as while it has been mostly that, some days were a little more challenging than others. It is a place that we have gone to to celebrate my son and his accomplishments, discussed our plans for his future, and shared what we loved about him the most. There were more difficult times as well, as we had conversations that were fraught with emotion and made, at least myself, stop to consider what his future might be and how we could make it better. The location for these deep profoundly emotional conversations you ask, our church, a therapist’s or doctor’s office, maybe even a restaurant or social setting? No, actually it’s none of those, it is in fact, the conference room at my son’s elementary school where we have met consistently over the years for his IEP. The time had come for us to be moving on from the IEP room.

I want to be clear about a few things here. First off, this is absolutely not his last IEP meeting, as we are merely graduating up to middle school next year where he will be absorbed into their life skills program. It will also not be the last time he will see his classmates, as most of them will also be following him up, including some therapists and other staff that he had worked with at the school that we will continue to interact with. But this day, will be the last time that this particular group of people will meet in this particular room to talk about one child that is most important to me: my own son. While I have no particular attachment to the building or the room itself, I do find myself being sentimental about all of the events that took place there, the meetings and discussions, the samples of his work and the occasional video clip of him in the classroom, the times when he would be brought in the room for a pop in and then quickly decided that he didn’t quite like being the center of attention. 

Being the place where so many conversations about my son took place, I find those to be the piece of these experiences I maybe hold onto the most, and how they have morphed and changed over time, from the early days of him being a Kindergartener and his parents still in shock that our child could even be in school at all, fast forwarding a few years then to more intensive conversations about his ability to speak or read, and how we and our private therapy team would lobby the school staff for him to be doing more or trying something else. As I consider the meeting today and what I will experience walking into the room as dad, sitting at my usual spot next to my wife at the large rectangular meeting table, I wonder what this last conversational will be like, a celebration of his all of the great work and accomplishments that he achieved, or will it also be tinged with the reminder that there is so much still he has not mastered or cannot do, and I must accept that. But If I am truthful, I have seen true miracles of God come through my child with the things he has now shown himself to be capable of, from the increased speech and eye contact to the improvements in both his gross and fine motor skills. I have marveled at his ability to navigate stairs and hallways more independently, find and put things away in his locker, sit with attention at his work table and attend better to each task.

I also think about the amount of people that have crossed my son’s and therefore me and my wife’s path over the years. Are there any typical families that have the unique experience of having so many different “specialists” in their child’s life? Sure, he has had the normal amount of classroom teachers each year, in his mainstream classes that is, but what about his life skills/special education teachers and aides? I reflect on all of the therapists from both the school side and our own private team of therapists that have all shared a seat at that table, some who have been with us for years and some never to be seen again. Some of these folks had become very close to my family, and there are even those who do not work with our child anymore that still very much care for him and reach out. But so many have come and gone that I know being in that room today will elicit a strange nostalgia for me, as the voices of all those who have shared a place at that table will be echoing in my memory.

 I am writing the ending to this piece after the meeting was over. That afternoon played out as it had so many times before, as we went to the main office door and checked ourselves in with the secretaries, waited in the lobby for the associated members of our team to get there. We stepped into the conference room for the last time, and I, after putting my folder and bottle of water in my usual spot, actually took my phone out to get a quick couple of pictures of the room. Once everyone got settled in we did the familiar round of introductions, some faces having repeated their names to me a hundred times before, and some being very new, specifically the lead teacher for his life skills program next year. There were reviews of his goals which he had met in part, and a discussion of the future ones, some we had serious disagreement with, but overall our concerns we met, as they always were. We discussed the setup for summer school at the middle school he was moving to, shared the last comments we felt on our hearts, and wrapped the meeting in that room one last time.

I stood up, slowly, and took that space in one last time, grabbing a couple more pictures and saying goodbye to therapists I would see many more times, other therapists and teachers I’d never see again. I waited as my wife finished up some conversations and I went inside, one last quick highlight reel in my head of all these meetings here, but more specifically, the hopes and dreams I brought into this room. I thought about all of the ones that came true, and all of the ones that just had not and wondered, was God here all of those times, every time I prayed for healing and the possibility that the next meeting would be the last? A recent memory then popped in my head, one of him going on an open house tour of his middle school a few months back, and how excited and truthfully independent he was navigating that night. My son was not defined by the way any of the meetings here began or ended, he was like any child, moving on from this school from this stage of his life, and his parents were moving on from this IEP room. I knew God heard us then, because he gave us a child like any other, one who had just graduated fifth grade and whose identity could never be confined to that old conference room.