I’m Special Read Free Page B

scary amount, but sometimes when I talk to her, I can’t help but feel like it’s going at the pace of a Sofia Coppola movie.
    Ironically, my father—the one who always held back from me when I was younger—is now my best friend. We go on vacations together. We hold hands when we walk down the street. In fact, I call him more than he calls me. So the moral of the parenting story seems to be that if you create a distance with your child, they’ll grow up wanting your approval and become enamored with you. However, if you do everything for them and love them more than anyone else possibly could, they’re going to ignore your phone calls. WTF?

    Shortly before my parents announced that they were getting divorced, they combined forces one last time to drop a bombshell on me.
    â€œRyan, you need to have surgery. Major surgery.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I screamed at them. “Am I going to die?”
    â€œNo, honey,” my mom said. “You aren’t going to die.”
    â€œWell, Karen, it is an intense operation . . .”
    â€œDennis, stop!” My mom turned to me. “You need to have an Achilles tendon–lengthening surgery.”
    â€œAnd a femoral derotational osteotomy.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œIt means you’re going to have to be in a wheelchair for three months, sweetie.”
    â€œThree months in a wheelchair? I can’t!”
    â€œHoney, you have no choice,” my mom said. “I’m sorry.”
    â€œOh, also kiddo, you’re going to have to be in a full-body cast for two weeks,” my father said.
    Oh my God. This is the secret life of the mildly disabled child. We play in the sandbox, we have friends at school, and then we tell everyone, “BRB. Gotta go be in a full-body cast for a bit. Have a great summer!” I hated it. When you’re older, you actively look for ways to stand out. If I got into a body cast today for two weeks, I would just laugh, take ten thousand pictures of it on Instagram, and watch the “likes” rack up. But when you’re seven years old, the differences are your undoing. We’re conditioned to ignore the things that make us ourselves and want nothing more than to disappear into a sea of bland and trendy clothing labels.
    My time in a full-body cast was spent in my bedroom with the blinds drawn and channeling Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window , but I still had to go back to school in a wheelchair. Luckily, my parents had spent every last dime of their money on enrolling me in a small Episcopalian school where the average class size was fifteen, just so I could have closer relationships with my peers and minimize the risk of dealing with assholes. I went to St. Paul’s in Ventura, California, from preschool to eighth grade and grew up with my classmates. We became a tight dysfunctional family, and even though we were occasionally rude to one another, no one made fun of me for my disability. Well, except this one time a girl ridiculed me for drooling on her during art class, but her own sister had cerebral palsy, so her taunts must’ve been coming from a place of dark insecurity, right?
    Still, I dreaded going back to school in a wheelchair. I had no problem with being the special retarded son at home, but at St. Paul’s, I wanted to be like everybody else. I had spent so much of my time making sure that my life with cerebral palsy didn’t bleed into my life at school. Miraculously it worked! If I made people laugh, I could distract them from the fact that I was wearing leg braces and ran like Forrest Gump. But after school, I was confronted with the reality of my body’s limitations. Physical therapy, endless doctor appointments, painful stretches when I got home—these were things I wanted to keep hidden from my friends, because once they knew all of the weird daily routines I had to go through, I was worried they would actually pity me.