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Community Corner

Make No Small Decisions

Some decisions in life are just too big to actually make.

I’m about to make what I think is a very important decision regarding my daughter’s future: her fall classroom placement.

She currently attends a private school for children with autism. In the biz this is referred to as a “self-contained environment,” which is yet another bit of Orwellian school-speak that just means she is in a classroom exclusively with other children on the autism spectrum. 

My choices are to keep her at that school, transfer her to a different self-contained classroom that would also provide some opportunity for “mainstreaming” into general education classrooms, or to fully mainstream her into a regular classroom with the help of an aide.

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Even though she’s only seven years old, it’s hard not to think of this decision as having potentially long-term implications. I torture myself with the thought that one of the paths versus the others might include, for instance, a teacher that could make all the difference in her life.

This is in stark contrast to how my parents made decisions that impacted my life as a child. First of all, they never would have couched it as I just did in the previous sentence. There weren’t many decisions that they even thought of as affecting me at all.

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When I was 10 years old, we made a big move from the city out to the far hinterlands of the suburbs. Did they not know that I was at a fragile age when girls’ self-esteem tends to plummet? Did they research the reputation of the school district that we were moving to, tour the schools, and meet with the administrators and teachers to discuss my transition? 

Nope. They just called around to a bunch of schools to see if there was one that had openings for me and all of my siblings so they could minimize the chauffeuring around to multiple schools. I’d like to think this was only because there was no such thing as GreatSchools.org at the time, but, really, that’s just how you parented back then. All business, zero navel-gazing.

And while I lived to tell about it, there’s no denying the course of my life was changed by that move. I ended up at a high school in Joliet where I became friends with Debbie who was going to University of Illinois so I did too because I had nothing better to do and that led to me working for my friend Sue who probably hired me in part because she was an Illini as well and then that company relocated me overseas where I met my future husband on a tram in Amsterdam that I almost missed and if I would have I’d have met a totally different guy who would have cheated on me and treated me badly and then I would have gotten hit by a car and died but I didn’t and then some years later my husband and I had a baby and our unique genetic cocktail produced the beautiful, amazing, and oh-so-special little girl that is my daughter the end. 

See how that works? There may be part of the plot of a Gwyneth Paltrow movie in there somewhere, but it’s mostly all true. How can you come to any other conclusion than that every decision you make has equally far-reaching impact on your life? 

I wish I could stake out some middle ground between the analysis paralysis of today and the don’t-give-a-crap-edness of yore. Just some basic fact-finding and then go with your gut. But my gut doesn’t seem to be speaking to me right now.  Or maybe I just can’t hear it through all those layers of bismarck custard. 

So I decided to go the rational and completely un-insane route of assigning the three alternatives to each of the Dancing with the Stars finalists and let that decide my daughter’s fate. And I’m happy and proud to announce that come fall, my daughter will be playing wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

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