I mean, first of all, we've known each other a long time.

Second of all, tell us what that's like for her.

What's the next stage? Yeah, so she is at a local college at their program.

It's been great for her.

She goes in the mornings, gets picked up on a bus around 730 and is home around 230.

So that's been great.

That said, she and we would really love for her to be at a residential college program because of the skills and opportunities and especially the social opportunities that would come from that.

So how is it working with your other, so you have an 18 year old too, going to college? Yep.

Yeah.

But I didn't know that, and so I started off by thinking I was going to be letting her go through security alone, and that was gonna be, gonna be the end of it.

You know, we could check in through text or something, but.

So I just called the airline, and the person I spoke with didn't know, didn't tell me that I could go with Penny to the gate.

And so she gave me lots of other advice about how to do this, and one of the things that was actually a really cool part of the story was recognizing that airlines are, at least Delta, [laughs] was set up to want to encourage this type of-

Hmm

...

but they did give me a sense of how, as a mom, you might help prepare your child, depending on what their needs are, just to think through, yeah, like what is this gonna be like for them on the plane? We also got a, like, a swag bag from Delta.

Mm-hmm

...

the giftedness of the other person, and assuming the need of the other person.

And what maybe comes with all of that is assuming the needs and the giftedness of myself.

Like, that sense of what if we actually need each other.

What if there's something that I have to offer you and something you have to offer me? That really helps me to pay a different type of attention when I'm in an encounter with a child or an adult with a disability, if I'm really thinking about what do you need and what do I need, and how might those actually somehow line up with each other, um, in a kind of beautiful way.

I think the other thing is just to, um, not be afraid to admit ignorance.

Yeah.

Can you talk about those those two opposites?

yeah they were it's so interesting and this is really looking back now over many years of people kind of explaining to me how i should see penny's diagnosis and the first is a very lovely essay i recommend it by a woman named emily pearl kingsley who actually was a writer for sesame street for many years and her son was the first character with down syndrome on sesame street so she knows of what she writes and she wrote this essay called welcome to holland in which she compares getting an unexpected diagnosis of down syndrome to going on vacation and getting off the plane, thinking that you're going to be in Italy and finding out that instead you're in Holland.

And she captures something real there, that sense of disorientation, that sense of this is not what I expected.

What am I doing here? All of those feelings.

But at the same time, I've realized over the years, like we're not on vacation.

You know, that's not actually what's going on in our experience of being the parent to Penny.

And then on the flip side of that, I also had a lot of people over the years say essentially they're getting at that sense of you never know what's going to happen to your child.

How did you how have you seen that conversation?