Today I Am the Mother of an Adult

My daughter turns 18 today.

I wasn't there on April 17, 1990, when she was born in a Russian hospital -- deprived of oxygen, in a coma for thirteen hours, not expected to survive or thrive. I wasn't there when she left the hospital after three months to go to the orphanage she would call home until November of 1994, when finally my husband and I were there, to adopt her and bring her home with us forever.

I wasn't there, but I have the paperwork. Pages and pages of dire predictions and scary diagnoses, in two languages. I have years of reports from neurologists, including the one early on who looked at her contemptuously and said, "This child has cerebral palsy, why did you adopt her?" I have the reams of evaluations from the school system, countless trees felled in the effort to document just how far from the norm she strayed, how unlikely she was to succeed.

And, like any parent who's spent some time in the special-education system, I have the scars and bruises from IEP meetings in which my perception of the beautiful capable girl growing up in my home differed so much from the image of weakness and inability being presented. I still bristle when I remember the way her beloved speech therapist said inclusion would destroy her, or a child-study-team leader said her teacher of two months knew her better than I did.

Well, guess what, naysayers. She's 18. She's indestructible. And I still know her better than any teacher or committee or thick stapled paper packet can ever do. You know the words, but I know the music.

There have been bumps, to be sure, anxiety attacks (hers and mine), bad classrooms, rude classmates. Hers has not been a perfect school experience. Show me a high school kid who's had one. I take pride in the fact that, although the work remains hard for her, she does it diligently, listens hard, works hard, tries hard, and is well-liked by her teachers. She's proud of those things, too. They are not small things. They are her strengths, which are not inconsiderable.

Due to a slow start in school, she's still only a sophomore, so full adult-style independence is a ways off for this brand-new 18-year-old. But she'll likely be getting a driver's license next month (something you'd never expect possible from looking at those downbeat reports), and she'll be registering to vote in her very first presidential election. Adulthood has some privileges.

And so does motherhood, including the privilege to brag, which I have been going on with here for far too many words. Let's leave it at happy birthday, then, to a pretty exceptional young woman, who is so very, very much more than the sum of her paperwork.