The Door Trilogy: Part 1

The Door That Doesn’t Open

Parents will move heaven and earth for their children. They will find every way through a complex world, like a river carving its own path, valley by valley, until it reaches the sea.

For parents of children with autism, or any kind of neurodivergence or disability, reaching the sea can feel like a distant delusion. You don’t just find the river. You create it. You dig the valleys yourself. You march through the desert like a hermit following stars, hoping the promised land exists, hoping you are walking in the right direction.

The search for an inclusive school in Kigali is, for many of us, that desert.

May had just ended. School hunting season had begun. For us, it was not a search; it was a quest. Finding a place that would accept Sun and Moon as they came, fully, without conditions we could not meet.

A school will write on its website: We welcome children of all abilities. We are inclusive. What they don’t tell you is that every school has an ability meter, calibrated quietly to their resources, their capacity, their comfort. They will ask you to bring your children so they can see them. Seeing, you will learn, means assessing whether your children are manageable.

Their word, not mine.

I had visited several schools before the one that finally said yes.

The first was almost unreachable; the road had collapsed, literally, as if the earth itself had decided this was not meant to be. The second had closed applications. No room left. I went home and cried. It was close to us, a good school, exactly what I had hoped for, and the door was simply shut. Not because of Sun and Moon. Because of timing, capacity, and the ordinary cruelty of how things sometimes fall. But it didn’t feel ordinary standing outside it. It felt like one more door in a long corridor of doors, and I was running out of corridor.

There was another school, farther away, but their cousin attended, and we had heard they already had a few children with autism. That meant someone had said yes before. That meant it was possible. But the distance was too much, and I was already too tired, and possibility alone was not enough that day.

I want to pause here and say something honest: I did not always approach these doors the way I do now. I used to be more idealistic, more convinced that the right words, the right presentation, the right version of myself would open any door I knocked on. Parenting Sun and Moon has quietly, steadily, transformed me into a pragmatist. Not a cynical one. A practical one. You learn, after enough closed gates, that you do not force doors that could be opened elsewhere. You go where you are accepted. You save your energy for what is actually available.

So, I turned to the school next door. Not because it was my first choice. Because it was close, and I was exhausted, and sometimes that is the full and honest extent of what you have to work with.

I brought the facilitator, a professional from Horizons Hearts who had already met our boys in therapy and understood something of their world. Together we sat across from the administration, and I pledged my full parental support if anything went wrong. He pledged his alongside mine. I made our case not with performance or desperation but with the quiet steadiness of someone who has learned that clarity is more useful than pleading.

When they said yes, something in my chest shone.

Joy. Relief. The particular relief of a body that has been braced for a long time and is finally allowed to soften, just for a moment. I thought of Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow, and I let myself have the yes, fully, before the next question arrived.

Tomorrow would come. It always does.

But that evening, the door was open. And we walked through it.