It is not often that I take time to share about my family but some recent events in my life have caused me to really consider what is important. I know that my wife would probably kill me if she knew I was writing about this but I will take the chance….God knows it is not the first one that I have taken.
As many of you know my wife Jan and I have two daughters, Erin (17) and Katie (15). Erin is a senior in high school and contemplating life in college and all that goes on with those decisions. My other daughter Katie who has “special needs” (diagnosed with Williams Syndrome) lives outside our home in a group home run by an organization called Child Serve. She has lived in this type of setting for the past three and a half years. She attends a local high school as a sophomore. So two daughters, 17 and 15 years old, both in high school and oh what a ride it is!
What happened recently involves my youngest daughter and her take on life. I know we all get caught up in our own daily lives and as a result of this sometimes things get blown out of proportion. Every once in a while something brings you back down to reality. This happened to me just a few weeks ago.
It was a Friday afternoon when I received a call from my daughter Katie and it was apparent from the tone in her voice that she was very excited. “I have a date for the homecoming dance” she exclaimed. She then repeated this to me in a high pitched teenage girl squeal. I almost had to pull the phone away from my ear. As I began to question her about how this happened and who was the boy and how did he ask her she stopped me abruptly in my conversation to tell me that she asked him, well not actually him, but she asked his teacher to ask him because he wasn’t in school that day. Huh? She had it very clear…she asked the boy Ben’s teacher who asked him if he would like to go with her and he told the teacher to tell Katie that yes he would love to go with her to the dance.
It all seemed so simple to her. This caused me to think back 100 years when I was in high school. If I had only known that I could have one of my teachers ask the girls if they would go to the dance with me life would have been much easier. I quickly snapped back to reality realizing that I have been pretty lucky getting my wife to marry me so all was OK in my world despite having to get my own dates for homecoming dances and proms.
So my 15 year old was growing up, going to homecoming at her high school, which just happened to be on the same night as homecoming for our other daughter Erin’s school. Thank goodness that the timing worked out so we did not have to pick.
Homecoming day arrives and we have to go through all the fanfare of this “BIG” day for my girls. My wife handled all the appointments for the haircuts, the make-up, the nails, etc. I sat back and watched a football game or two while all this was going on. I have to admit thought that I was very excited about Katie’s first homecoming dance. She was so-o-o-o excited about this first official date.
The night finally arrived and the plan was for us to meet Katie and her date and others from her class at their dinner prior to the dance where we could take some pictures. Katie was bursting with excitement on the phone about how she was going to “dance all night long”. We got to the dinner right on-time and were met by Katie who immediately brought us over to meet Ben, her date for the evening. We were mildly surprised to say the least when we saw that Ben was seated in a wheel chair. We quickly found out that Ben, a handsome boy, was a quadriplegic with a feeding tube who did not communicate verbally.
Let me step back and say that for three weeks leading up to this homecoming dance Katie had been telling us about Ben. She talked about how they were going to dance and she remarked how funny he was. Even on that special night when we were at dinner, when I pulled out my camera, she ran over to the side of Ben’s chair and put her arms around his shoulders and gave us all a big smile. A tear came to my eye as well as my wife’s eye.
You see Katie does not see the world the way many of us see the world on a daily basis. Katie is full of joy 99.9 % of the time. Katie doesn’t see wheelchairs or feeding tubes. It never dawned on her to tell her mom or dad that the boy she invited to homecoming didn’t walk. She was happy, as happy as a girl who was the homecoming queen going with the homecoming king.
It caused me to pause and think for a minute (actually a lot longer than this)…why can’t more people be like this?
