Originally appeared in The News & Observer:
When the waiter hands us our menus, my best friend and I simultaneously reach into our purses for our reading glasses and then laugh at each other as the cases pop open. When we started this tradition in 1999, we both could actually see.
That was the year we dropped off our babies for their first day of kindergarten and met for lunch somewhere or other to console each other. Since then, we've met for lunch on the first day of school every year.
No doubt, if we cared to check the photographic evidence, we'd discover that we both had horrific perms in 1999. This year, we're both sporting defiantly uncolored gray, and it takes three pieces of cheesecake between us to make this somewhat sorrowful day sweeter.
Because this first-day lunch will be the last.
My baby is now a 240-pound offensive lineman senior at Broughton High, and hers is an actor driving a 342-pound wheelchair at Enloe High. For all of us, it has been quite a ride.
Through the years, our lunch chatter has always included worries on navigating a new school year with our sons who have some special needs (about 20 percent of schoolchildren in Wake County fit that category). Could I have ever anticipated trying to get "lies in floor while chewing candy for fourth-grade writing test" added to my son's Individual Education Plan to accommodate his Sensory Processing Disorder? Could Cindy have known that fifth grade would bring a child so exhausted from his deteriorating condition due to spinal muscular atrophy that she would have to pick him up at noon for weeks?
For Cindy, fifth grade also brought a frantic search for a magnet middle school after the principal at her assigned school refused, once it was ascertained that there were no suitable electives for her son, to let him just go home and rest. He could sit in the library, the principal said. For me, that year brought a battle with the student assignment office, which found it difficult to believe that, yes, indeed, I wanted my two middle school children at separate schools because my son needed to be at a smaller school.
Sixth grade was the year my son won a spot in his school's geography bee, an honor he nearly missed because the fellow student who graded his paper had marked half of his right answers wrong. She couldn't read his writing, illegibility being a hallmark of his fine-motor disorder. His teacher thankfully noticed.
For Cindy's son, it would be hard to top seventh grade - the year he spent his 13th birthday trapped on the second floor of his newly renovated school because the brand-new elevator was broken for the zillionth time. Five firefighters showed up, not to carry her son, who trusted only the 6-foot-5 special ed teacher to carry him, but to carry the electric wheelchair. Cindy had central office on speed dial that year.
High school brought, for me, an honors science teacher who thought it would be better to move my son out of the class, with its high concentration on lab drawings, than to work with his issues.
For Cindy, it brought bureaucratic insanity as she tried to bypass a state law requiring all students to take P.E. and health to graduate. Her son, who has never walked, can barely lift a spoon to his mouth, and the state was willing to pay a teacher to give him one-on-one P.E. just to meet this requirement. After much aggravation, she has gotten a waiver. The same year, her son was unable to take the one acting elective he wanted because the physicality of the class was too much for him. Oh, the irony.
As a salve for the most maddening moments, we have the sweetest stories. The teacher of a physically challenging elementary elective who would tell me with tears in her eyes how much my son's earnest hard work touched her. The middle school drama teacher who cast Cindy's son in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and made King Oberon in a wheelchair work.
Or the eighth-grade social studies teacher who called me unbidden, literally crying, to apologize after she handed my son a map he had colored on the first day of school and told him to do a better job. The stricken look on his face had her check his IEP, and she was devastated at her mistake. The school system physical therapist who showed up at Cindy's house this summer just because she wanted to better understand the process of his getting a new $28,000 wheelchair.
Or the Broughton principal who truly listens and sounds all of the right notes of concern. The Enloe English teacher who encourages Cindy's son in his writing.
Next up for us is getting these boys, now young men, into college. During the process, we may rid ourselves of the gray hair simply by tearing it all out. The soothing comfort of a forever friendship and the cheering power of cheesecake, however, await.
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