On graduation and the grievability of disabled children

Later this week is my daughter’s Grade 7 graduation. I will go. I will sit under fluorescent lights in a hall filled with cameras and congratulatory speeches, surrounded by other parents who are, I’m sure, genuinely proud and sincerely exhausted. I will smile at the children, I will clap when it is time to clap, and I will do my best to be normal.

Because this is what is required of me, isn’t it? The performance of normalcy. I have memorised the choreography. I have pre-processed my grief, crying for hours while I walk my dogs alone—that crazy lady in the park with red eyes and tear-streaked cheeks, mumbling curses to herself. I have catalogued the pain and tried to knead the visceral into something pliable, something I can set aside to rise for another day, so we can kick that meltdown further down the line.

I will not cry too early or too visibly. I will not bring up my son—the missing twin—who is not graduating, or correct the silent, hopeful assumptions that he’s off somewhere gifted, flourishing, winning at some other school. I know plenty of mothers that have had to grieve a twin who died in utero. This is not that bad. I will try not to ruin everything by convincing myself this isn’t horrible. He doesn’t even want to be here. He’s chosen to stay in bed.

My son, who once sparkled with hunger to learn, who was born at three pounds six ounces and fought tooth and nail just to reach kindergarten, is now lying in bed most days, since March, unable to do basic tasks, because the very institution charged with supporting him instead shattered his trust and destroyed his desire to learn.

He was obsessed with ancient Egypt when he was two. While other toddlers were stacking blocks and eating paste, my son was sounding out the names of pharaohs and decoding hieroglyphs. He was captivated by the rituals of embalming. I remember a daycare teacher gently suggesting that perhaps he should stop telling the other two-year-olds that the brain is extracted through the nose during mummification. He had just begun to speak—and when he did, it came out in long, complex sentences, peppered with interjections like “fortunately,” as if he had been quietly studying the world and was finally ready to report back.

“I remember a daycare teacher gently suggesting that perhaps he should stop telling the other two-year-olds that the brain is extracted through the nose during mummification.”

A Parent

He loved to learn, but somewhere along the line, that was lost in some tomb.

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened gradually, predictably, systematically. Every September, the supports he needed to access learning were stripped away or delayed. Every year, I had to start over advocating, to prostrate myself, begging for the simple supports he needed—fidgets that a teacher locked away, breaks that weren’t offered, someone to clear the kids away if he was hurt so he wouldn’t accidentally come up punching and hurt someone else. And while I fought to restore what should never have been removed, my children—both of them—were excluded. My daughter endured long periods out of class as well. But as she walks across the stage, which I am expected to count as a win, as though being temporarily permitted is the same as being welcomed.

My son, however, does not. After months of escalating harm, prolonged exclusion, and sustained pressure from the district to move him, he stopped attending altogether. He does not feel entitled to an education anymore. And that, to me, is the measure of the damage.

But this is not just a story about what happened to my children. This is a story about what our society does—and does not—grieve.

Because no one is holding space for my son. There will be no empty chair. No collective pause. No mention of the child who should have been there. He has already been disappeared from the narrative. And that erasure is not accidental. It is policy, practice, and political strategy. It is the institutional embodiment of a cultural truth: we do not grieve the children who are gone. We pretend they’re somewhere wonderful. Not laying in bed, regressed from burnout, unable to participate in simple routines like taking a bath or brushing their hair, because the demand is too much.

“that erasure is not accidental. It is policy, practice, and political strategy. It is the institutional embodiment of a cultural truth: we do not grieve the children who are gone. We pretend they’re somewhere wonderful.”

A Parent

What would it mean for the parent beside me in the aisle to carry even a portion of the guilt? To feel implicated in the system that has driven my son from education? To realise that their child’s passage—this stage, this applause, this potluck—was made possible in part by the quiet exclusion of others? The calculation from politicians that you wouldn’t remember or feel guilt.

In public education, there is a manufactured scarcity. Time, energy, funding, attention: all are rationed. And when the principal is overloaded, when the teachers are unsupported, when the school district is underfunded but unwilling to change the paradigm, there is an unspoken calculation made again and again: 

Whose inclusion is non-negotiable, and whose is conditional?

My son’s was conditional. And when it became too hard, too slow, too expensive—he was gently, persistently pushed out. He didn’t fall through the cracks. He was sorted.

That the public does not grieve this is not an oversight. It is a decision. Politicians have made the calculated determination that the loss of children like mine will not register. That there will be no protest. No public outcry. No media coverage. No measurable political cost.

We have made certain children ungrievable.

According to a 2021 report from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, nearly one in ten Canadians with disabilities have left school entirely because of inadequate supports—rising to over 14% in British Columbia—while even more face prolonged exclusion and academic stagnation publications.gc.ca. This isn’t simply an educational failure—it’s systemic abandonment. Policies are supposed to guarantee equal access, but underfunding, understaffing, and bureaucratic neglect turn those mandates into paper shields for a culture that quietly permits some children to vanish without consequence.

And that is what I will carry with me as I try to be normal.

Because I am not only grieving my own child’s exclusion—I am grieving that every year, more names vanish from the list, while others learn they must not be themselves to be loved.

My daughter will walk across the stage. I am proud of her—how could I not be? But I am also angry. Because her inclusion is conditional too. It is based on masking and it is performative. It is a kind of perverse tokenism, a moment of highly visible “success” to mask a year in which she was largely excluded, unsupported, and erased.

Her presence on that stage is not evidence of access. It is the final stroke on a painting meant to conceal many poorly executed lines. Because the truth underneath is this: my daughter spent most of the year sitting in the hallway because the school, understaffed and unwilling to adapt, simply didn’t provide the support she needed to be in class.

And still, they will applaud—they will say how wonderful it is to see her there, how proud we must be—as if this moment is redemptive. As if being allowed to walk across a stage after a year of neglect is the same as belonging.

“As if being allowed to walk across a stage after a year of neglect is the same as belonging.”

A Parent

They will ask politely what my son’s up to and my forehead will crease like a sudden pain has come over me and I will say something pinched but polite. That’s what I’ve been practising anyway.

They will say aren’t you glad that homework is over for the year? But, I have never once helped either of my children with homework, because they have never been meaningfully taught. The school was only focused only on their containment, keeping them warehoused. If my children could be quiet, manageable, ignorable, the day was counted as a success.

Being bright and neurodivergent is a double edged sword in our public school system that cuts deep. It means your curiosity is seen as defiance. Your vocabulary as arrogance. Your questions as interruptions. And your meltdowns, when they come, as signs of personal pathology, rather than evidence of institutional betrayal.

“Being bright and neurodivergent is a double edged sword in our public school system that cuts deep.”

A Parent

So yes—I will go. I will try to be normal.

But I will not forget what this ceremony is built upon: the careful curation of who gets to be celebrated and why, the collective refusal to grieve the children who were pushed out, and the collective willingness to pretend that this—this moment of applause—is enough.

I will clap for my daughter. I will love her through the contradiction of being made both visible and disposable.

And I will carry the rage with me like a second skin, knowing with unbearable clarity that both of my children deserved so much more than this.