There is a folder on my desktop. It is full of photos of Adrián at school through the years. The first day of each year, multiple photos of random things, birthdays, school trips. The nervous smile he has perfected, the backpack that always seems slightly too big, and that particular way he holds himself when he is working very hard to look fine. Like when he smiles for the photo and shows all his teeth. I do prefer the more candid ones.
I was looking through it last week. And somewhere between the photo from four years ago and the one from last September, I felt it. That quiet, specific kind of nervousness, sadness, and excitement that does not have a clean name. Not sadness exactly. Not fear. Something closer to the feeling of watching a door close very gently behind someone you love.
Adrián is going to high school in September.
And I am not sure how to feel.
Everything He Is Leaving Behind
When you have an autistic child, school is not just school. It is a carefully built ecosystem. It is the teacher who learned, over months, that Adrián processes questions better when you give him five seconds instead of two. It is the support staff member who knows that if he is standing near the window during break it does not mean he is lonely. It means he is regulating. It is the classmates who have grown up alongside him and who, without anyone ever sitting them down and explaining it, just know how to be with him.
You do not build that in a week. You build it over years, through a hundred small misunderstandings that eventually become understandings. Through parents’ evenings where you sit across from a teacher and you watch them shift from reading a file to actually seeing your child. Through the quiet accumulation of trust.
We are leaving all of that behind in September.
When you have an autistic child, school is not just school. It is a carefully built ecosystem. And leaving it means starting from zero. Again.
We will still be at the school with Guillermo. Which is its own complicated thing. To walk through those same doors and know that Adrián is somewhere else, in a building full of people who do not know yet what we know. It is a strange kind of split. Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
The Unknown Is the Hardest Part
I have been trying to name exactly what it is that sits heaviest. And I think it is this: the unknown. Not the fear that something will go wrong. I know Adrián. He is resilient in ways that still surprise me. He has tools now that he did not have three, four, six years ago. He knows himself in a way that took years to build.
But a new school means new teachers who will need to learn him. New students who will not yet know how to read him. New routines, new spaces, new sensory landscapes. New everything.
And what I know about autistic children, and what I know about my son specifically, is that the unknown is not just stressful. It can be genuinely destabilizing. The safety that comes from predictability is not a preference. It is a need. And September is going to ask him to be flexible in ways that will cost him something.
I think about that cost a lot.
What We Are Doing to Prepare
We are not waiting for September. We have visited the school twice already. Not just the open day. We went back to meet the teachers, just Luis and I, and Adrián also visited the school on a school trip with all his classmates. While we visited, we walked the corridors slowly. We found his classroom. We sat in it. We saw the lockers. We talked about where the exits are and where he might go if he needs a minute. We showed him the special needs classroom where he gets extra support. We practiced the route from the front gate to the classroom hallway.
We are building a map. Not just a physical one, but an emotional one. What will the lunch area feel like? What happens if a lesson changes last minute? Who is the person he can go to? We are talking through all of it, not to eliminate the uncertainty, but to make the uncertainty smaller. More named. Less like a wall and more like a door he can see the handle of.
We are also being honest with him. He is twelve. He knows honesty is very important to us as a family. We have told him that it is normal to feel nervous. That not all his friends will be attending the same school. That starting somewhere new is hard for most people and harder for some. That the discomfort he will feel in the first weeks is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that his brain is working hard on something new. And that we will be right there with him through all of it.
The Grief That Nobody Talks About
Let us talk about the grief of transitions. The grief of leaving behind the people and places and rhythms that kept your child safe, knowing that building that safety again in a new place will take time you cannot shortcut.
I have been sitting with that grief lately. Not trying to fix it or talk myself out of it. Just letting it be there. Because I think that is what it deserves.
Adrián did not ask for any of this. He did not ask to be autistic, to need more from the world, to have to work harder than his peers just to feel okay in an ordinary room. He has done all of that with more grace than I think I would have managed. And in September, he is going to be asked to do it all over again, in a new place, from scratch.
The grief is not about him being autistic. It is about how hard transitions are. And how much courage it takes to walk through an unfamiliar door when you already know the cost of being misunderstood.
What the New School Will Hear About Him
One thing that has helped me feel less anxious about September is knowing that his current school and teachers are not just handing over a file. They are going to sit down with the new school and talk about Adrián. And I know, I genuinely know, that what they say will go far beyond a list of difficulties.
Yes, they will talk about where he needs support. About the areas where learning can be harder for him. That is important and I am glad they will. But I also know his teachers. I have watched them with him for years. And they are going to talk about who he is. His knowledge of history, trains, and dates. The way he will quietly observe a situation for weeks before deciding to participate. The fact that he has a sense of humor that is unexpected and completely his own. The way he makes people around him feel loved and cared for, often without even realizing he is doing it.
They are going to walk into that meeting and talk about a person, not a diagnosis. And that matters more than I can say.
Because I have learned, over the years, that the educators who truly helped Adrián were not the ones who read his file most carefully. They were the ones who got curious about him as a person first. Everything else followed from that. I want his new school to start from the same place.
The Friends Who Are Going With Him
There is something else that I keep coming back to, and it has been bringing me more comfort than I expected.
A group of his classmates are going to the same high school. Kids who have grown up alongside Adrián. Who have, over the years, without anyone orchestrating it, figured out how to be his people. They know how to be with him. They know when to give him space and when to pull him in. That kind of understanding is not something you can manufacture. It is built over time, through shared lunches and group projects and years of just being in the same room together.
I am not naive about what high school means. They are going to have their own lives, their own friendships, their own things to navigate. It is not their job to look after Adrián and I would never want them to feel that weight. That is not friendship. That is obligation, and it is not fair to anyone.
But the bond is there. I have seen it. And I have faith, real faith, that it will carry forward. That it will evolve into whatever friendship looks like in this next chapter. That even as everyone grows into their own person, there will still be something between them that recognizes each other. That says: I know you. I have always known you.
That is actually everything.
To Every Parent Facing the Same September
If you are here because your child is also making a transition this year, I want you to know that what you are feeling makes complete sense. The anxiety. The protectiveness. The strange mixture of pride and worry that sits in your chest when you think about them walking into something new.
It is not weakness. It is love that has learned, over years, exactly how much work goes into keeping your child safe and seen. And it is the knowledge that you are going to have to build all of that again.
You will. I know that. And so will they.
But it is still a lot. And it is okay for it to be a lot.
We are all just doing our best with the September we have been given.
With love,
Dalisse
If this post resonated with you
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