They asked us to send a baby photo for her grade 7 graduation—a charming tradition, I suppose, meant to evoke nostalgia and growth, to mark the passage from innocence to adolescence with curated tenderness: smiles, ceremony, and a slideshow of what once was.
So I opened the folders on my computer, the ones I haven’t allowed myself to linger in for some time. There she was, tiny, with brilliant blue eyes and a mischievous little smile that seemed already to know the punchline. And beside her, in image after image, her brother—not just a sibling, but her twin, though their paths have long since parted. He is sweet in every frame, sometimes caught mid-frown, annoyed by the camera’s gaze, sometimes thoughtful, as though he’s already puzzling over how the world fits together. There are rolls of baby-soft flesh and whole-body giggles, small flashes of wonder, and so much uncomplicated delight.
He should have been graduating too, but he isn’t.
He left school before spring, not with drama or rupture, but with quiet surrender—not because he lacked intelligence or promise, but because the institutions that were supposed to support him failed, then faltered, then fractured entirely. There were meetings, yes. Documents. Plans. Smiles. So many reassurances and interventions. And yet, again and again, he was asked to adapt to a system that refused to adapt to him. Again and again, he was punished for expressing distress in the only language his nervous system knew. Again and again, he came home quieter than the day before.
Now, he does not leave his room.
Exclusion is not always loud—not always marked by suspension notices or dramatic incident reports. Sometimes it is slow and cumulative, a quiet hollowing out. Sometimes it is the erosion of trust, each moment of unacknowledged overwhelm compounding into shame, each unmet need becoming a fracture in his sense of belonging, until even the relationships that once felt safe begin to shift, and he learns—viscerally, irrevocably—that presence comes at too great a cost.
And still, the emails arrive: reminders about graduation, about the slideshow, the speeches, the celebration of becoming, the well-meaning myth of inclusion—all unfolding as if in another universe, adjacent to the life of a boy who learned, early and often, that the world was not built for him, and who now moves through it only when absolutely necessary, and only on his own terms.
He’s been mostly in bed for 3 months.
People sometimes say, with a shrug, “maybe traditional school just wasn’t a good fit,” as though we are talking about extracurriculars or elective classes, as though it is a neutral misalignment rather than the outcome of chronic underaccommodation, systemic bias, and quiet institutional cruelty. As though we didn’t try. As though we didn’t plead. As though we weren’t told, gently at first and then with weary bluntness, that our son would only belong here if he could be smaller, quieter, easier to manage.
All children are grievable—not only the ones who appear in the end-of-year slideshow, but especially the ones who do not. All children begin as someone’s baby: longed for, imagined, delighted in. All children deserve support that honours their full humanity—not only their capacity to perform under duress.
We had a meeting with the district, probably after they were already quite sure he wasn’t coming back. They told us they hoped to see him in September, that he would always be welcome. It was meant kindly, I think, but it landed like like a stab in the back. So much of what he needed was needed before. Before retreat became survival. Before we were left trying to patch together a future from fragments.
Time does not wait. And trauma, when layered and unaddressed, can grow tangled in ways that defy easy resolution. I may spend the rest of my life trying to reach him, to hold open the possibility of healing—not just for him, but for all of us. It is not the future I imagined, raising a boy so precocious, so vividly intelligent, so full of curious questions. But it is the one I now live.
So when you watch those photos fade in and out to soft music this June, I hope you will think of him, and others like him—the ones whose absences are not acknowledged because they disrupt the tidy story of success, the ones who never stopped needing care, only stopped asking for it.
Because every child deserves a future. And some of them are still waiting for the world to make room.
