Last week, I attended my daughter’s very last IEP meeting. Rhia turns 22 in May, which means she will no longer qualify for school based services. Instead, she will be a full fledged, 100% adult, with all the challenges and opportunities that provides. I sat beside her at the the meeting, surrounded by people who have been a part of her life since elementary school. Her current teacher used to be her aid in the 4th grade. Now he led the meeting that would transition her into adulthood.
Fighting back tears, I stated my concerns. Who will be her Sign Language interpreter? How will she continue to learn ASL? Which program will provide the most flexibility while still providing social opportunity so she can make friends? How will we fight the isolation that comes when a person is deaf-blind and uses a wheelchair to travel?
No one knew the answers. Everyone was worried and everyone tried hard to come up with solutions. But what I really wanted was someone to take charge with their magic wand and create the perfect program for my daughter. Unfortunately, no one had a wand.
It’s not that I didn’t know this day would come; her IEP team and I have been discussing it since the 8th grade. Transition is a big deal so it takes years to plan. The problem is that my daughter is medically fragile and has serious communication challenges. We live in a tiny town with limited opportunities. We really need to move to Berkeley or Santa Rosa, but who can afford the rent? So here we are, Smallville California, hoping the perfect program for my Disney loving, shy, cheerful daughter will appear.
Rhia keeps asking me what will happen when school ends. I tell her she’ll go into a different program for grown-ups. She’ll make new friends and maybe take classes at college again. She scrunches up her brows and looks at me sideways, not sure if I’m telling the truth. But I am; I’m telling her what I hope will happen. When I ask her what she wants she says she doesn’t know, but she’d like to move to “LA” so we can go to Disneyland everyday. Darling, if I could, I would, but I can only afford to live in a tiny town in NorCal where the adult programs are geared toward work and very few people know ASL.
I really need Godmother’s wand!