The Night He Got to Be Fully Himself

There are moments in parenting that stay with you long after they happen, moments that are difficult to put into words but that you find yourself returning to again and again because something in them feels important and true.

This is one of those moments for us.

Our oldest son has autism and a seizure disorder, which means his world has real limits that shape nearly every part of his daily life. Over the years, we have learned to navigate those limits as gracefully as we can, to find genuine joy within them and to be honest with ourselves about what they have cost him and us. He is a precious young man and we love him dearly, and we have also learned that loving him well means paying attention to the things that make him come alive.

For a very long time, that thing has been Transformers. He has loved them with the kind of deep, wholehearted devotion that most of us lose somewhere along the way to adulthood. He knows the characters, storylines, voice actors and history in extraordinary detail. This is not a casual, fleeting interest! It is the language through which he understands and engages the world, and it always has been.

So this year, we flew from Florida to Chicago to take him to BotCon, the Transformers fan convention, because we wanted to give him something we had never quite been able to give him before. We wanted to put him in a room full of people who loved the same thing he loves as passionately as he does.

From the moment we arrived, he was overtaken with excitement. He ran down the convention hall and moved through it with wonder and joy that was beautiful to watch. He stopped at displays and talked at vendors and examined figures with genuine expertise, and the people around him received all of that naturally and without any awkwardness because they understood exactly what he was talking about. He was among his people, and he knew it, and it showed in every part of how he carried himself.

But the moment we will carry with us longest came one evening when they showed the original 1986 Transformers animated film. The audience was encouraged to yell the lines along with the characters, to sing the songs, to laugh and groan and cheer at all the right moments. And our son, who has spent so much of his life being the person in the room who laughs a little too loudly or recites lines that the people around him don’t quite understand, found himself in a place where all of that was not only acceptable but was exactly what everyone around him was doing too.

He sang. He recited lines. He laughed freely and loudly and with his whole self. And the people around him did the same, and nobody looked at him twice, and he knew it, and we could see him knowing it.

We sat there watching him and found it very difficult to speak.

There is something that parents of children with disabilities carry quietly, a hope that they rarely say out loud because it feels almost too large to name. It is the hope that their child will find a place where they belong, where the things that make them different become the very things that make them welcome. We have carried that hope for a long time, and on that evening in a convention room in Chicago, we got to watch it come true in a way that was more simple and more profound than we could have anticipated.

He got to be fully himself, totally in his element, surrounded by people who understood him, and it was one of the most meaningful things we have ever witnessed as his parents.

We are so grateful we went. We are grateful to everyone at BotCon who created a space where that kind of belonging was possible. And we are grateful, as we always are, for who our son is and for everything he has taught us about loving something wholeheartedly and without apology, simply because it brings you joy.