One Year From Now, We Will Throw an Adoption Party

One year from now, you’ll finally get your dream.

One year from now, we will throw an adoption party so joyous, that I won’t even worry about the mess we leave behind. (And I always worry about the mess.)

You used to tell me you didn’t want to grow up. That, in a way, parts of your childhood were so filled with poor memories and the push and pull- salt water taffy- that you wish you could go backwards in time; be a kid again.

“My brain won’t be fully developed until I’m 26,” you like to tell me, while also sometimes acting 26: “I’ve waited so long to choose my home and where I want to be… that now I don’t want to rush leaving.”

The number eighteen has seemed mythical, in a way: “Eighteen” is when you get to decide your fate. You get to be adopted, change your name; a wish come true.

“Seventeen is just one year a way,” You say, a number that’s become a means to an end… a digit for beginning, “I don’t want to grow up… but I also want to reach that age.”

But what of THIS age?’ I should ask. ‘What of seventeen?’ The system and our past has taught you to run so fierce towards the future, that a year of opportunity could swiftly become a past. You’ve earned this year. You’ve earned this safety, this rest. You’ve earned your seventeen.

Today, and this weekend, and this month, as we dance to the song “Alone” by Trampled by Turtles in our spring show, and ‘our’ hands - unbeknownst to many - sign the words “adopt”, and show how tall you’ve grown, and tick off our fingers “1, 2, 3”: I will know the secrets I wove in the song for you and he; How he chose all three. But even if a year from now your dream comes true, and you invite all the friends and dancers and teachers you love to cherish what you’ve wanted for so long, what I want for YOU this year is to remember this:

You are safe. You are here. You can rest.

Let us whisper it from every angle, in every birthday card, from every corner. You don’t need next year to feel it to be true. You’ve done it now, already, by simply becoming you.

“Come into the world alone. And you go out of the world alone. But in between… there’s you and me.”

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