image: ©LeisaHammett.com
Happy birthday, yesterday, to my only child. My daughter. My baby—now grown up young woman. Last year you turned a quarter of a century and those closest to you gathered at a restaurant and celebrated your milestone birthday. This year, while only a year older, of course, it sounds so startling as the number “26” is formed with my lips and tongue. My god, you are four years from 30! I have a near 30-year-old!
You are light. You are joyous. You are funny. You are fun. You are beautiful. You are an exceptional visual artist, your use of color, and maybe composition, savant. You are love. You are loving. You are kind. You make people smile.
You also challenge others. Can they see your beauty embedded in your difference? Do they fear you?
The answer to the later is yes, some do. I’ve long said that you are a barometer of people’s heart. How much can one’s love and compassion for someone differently abled expand to include you, accept you, embrace you? To not ignore you as you pass them by at the supermarket or as they watch you when I interact with you and them? I also long ago learned to accept this is the way of our world, which sees you, which sees others as “us” and “them.”
You, my love, have given my life it’s ultimate purpose, through you I channel my gifts into a greater purpose. You are my greatest teacher. I have come to learn—took me 17 years—that the true reason I named you Grace was that you came, in part, to teach me grace. You are here, in part, to challenge me and others to open our hearts and love, to tolerate difference, to learn that society’s expectations of perfection are. bullshit. You teach us to look through our hearts to a greater universe.
Thank you, my love, for the abundant (and challenging) lessons. It is my job now to continue to prepare you for the world and for someday, I hope, soon, to enter this new world in an integrated community with supports so that we can each continue to grow older well, healthy, balanced, independent—which includes continued supports for you. You teach us that is how the world can work when our hearts are open. When we embrace one another, not separate from one another. How we can make room for the different and offer the supports that we all need or may or will one day need. The world is a more beautiful place with variation. With difference.
Thank you, Grace Goad, for choosing me as your mother, for come to this earthly plane in this incarnation as a person with the special gifts of autism—your very living presence. Thank you for your beauty in your different. I love you now and forever. “To the moon and back.”—”Mommy”
