A has begun his last year of public school education. And he turns 21 this month!

I kind of love how, even as we are balanced on a knife’s edge with all these transitions, he just powers on relentlessly, enamored with his massive head of curls, intent on dressing well for compliments, and making sure his routine is nailed down.

His wellbeing is worth every moment of uncertainty we feel. We can’t stop ourselves from looking back over the last two decades. How everything changed. And how we’ve tried to make a home and a world that is safe for these young adults to be themselves.

Yesterday, A sat next to me to look at the photos on my phone, and he allowed me to massage his leg. It’s amazing when he is feeling unguarded enough for affectionate touch. At some point, he gave me a naughty side eye and a smile, as he opened only pictures of himself. I just couldn’t get enough of him and his joy. Even today, thinking and writing about it is flooding my heart with love.

Moving on to details now. When a disabled person turns 21, they have to switch afterschool programs immediately. I think this is a very mean thing to do to someone whose entire soul is about struggling with transitions. So you make it a do or die thing ON THEIR BIRTHDAY??? And they don’t get to celebrate their big day with their old friends.

RUDE.

Of course we hope the transition will be okay. My husband has cleared his schedule just in case. We are too seasoned to act unprepared! This is going to be THE topic for the foreseeable future.

This is not a huge thing, but I’m amused and eyebrow raising at the fact that we still have to have a (not IEP anymore) meeting with the school next week. I thought we’d be done. But they want to talk us through the upcoming transition, which we appreciate. We are terrified of every aspect of it, even though we’ve done all the paperwork and have a state appointed care coordinator we like. We are “go” for everything, and now all that’s left is the screaming.

This rite of passage reminds me of how scared I was to get married and move to the US. Even though I was going to be with the person I loved, I was freaking out at all of it. The only thing I could do was live it, and stay present for it.

Let me tell you, the jokes write themselves. My husband said that my response to stress was to fall asleep, and he wasn’t wrong. Of course I had jet lag and was exhausted from all the tasks I had been completing before leaving my country and people. But I really did shut down by sleeping!

We were in California so we could see his parents, and we went to a movie, where I slept. We went to dinner with his college friend, and I slept while we waited for a table. I slept through every car ride. And when we arrived in New Jersey, I yelled at him when he tried to wake me up early. LOL.

I don’t believe for one second that people simply make transitions without turmoil. But if they are loved and supported through them, as I was, it’s enough. And that’s what we plan to do for darling A.

R is in a liminal phase too. He’s graduated, and is still job hunting. I hope he lands somewhere meaningful for his career aspirations, and where he can be himself.

I want to be clear: none of what we are absorbed in clouds my mind about larger injustices and struggles. I’m never about giving myself or anyone else a pass for ostrich-ing from those. All struggles are connected. Ours are too.

If I had stayed in the thinking I had been taught, no part of autism life would have felt joyful, and I would have been chasing after social groups and institutions that had no care for my kids. Trying to beg for inclusion. Trying to get them to acknowledge my kids’ humanity. Pretending that proximity felt like having community.

So I’m thankful to the disabled writers and thinkers who helped me think differently, and made it possible for me to bring a clearer, more realistic lens to my parenting.

Because, whether I had that lens or not, this life is isolating and demanding, but at least now, I am not delusional. I feel like the Handala kid in Naji Ali’s comic, with his back turned to the world. He’ll grow up when Palestine is free. Samesies; I’ll have something to say to whoever’s out there when people make a choice to be free. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m doing my own work, and taking the action I can take.

And my household is always on the path to collective liberation, for all of us, and for you too. My version of it might not look “kind” to someone else, but it’s oriented toward justice, not doormat-ish self sacrifice. Not anymore.

There’s something haunting and terrible about having to abide in a reality where people in power force us to operate wherever they would for us to be stuck, and to watch as their devotees, rather than hold them to account, shape their thoughts to embrace stuck-ness. And then to have that dogged stupidity become curricula, policy, and justification for state violence.

So no, A turning 21 is not something happening in a vacuum. But also, our isolation is not the punishment and incarceration that society assumes it to be, because we no longer wish to be in a society that draws a direct line from disability, to burden on said society, to carceral abandonment/eugenics.

We like the world that exists in our home a lot more. It gives and celebrates and honors life. It keeps at foundation building rather than aesthetics. It grapples daily with the reality of dharma. It forges unexpected ties with people who have learned to grow nourishment from starved resources.

Radha.