It can be hard to believe that I was a person that actually went to my High School Prom. It may seem weird or abnormal to me, but my mother was the one that drove me to go as she felt that it was one of the expected social nuances that any high schooler should never go without experiencing and she made me no exception to that rule.

It has been a long-standing practice at my high school that the high school prom is a couples-only event, meaning that you could not go yourself. The expectation was couples only consisted of a male and a female, and that the male would ask the female they would wish to escort to the prom. As hard as this was to do, I did take the initiative to ask a close peer that I had known since Kindergarten to escort, and she agreed to do so .

I purchased the tickets and rented the tuxedo, and although wearing a tuxedo was extremely uncomfortable for me, I bared it. Our prom itself was the grand march in the high school auditorium followed by dinner and post prom that went throughout the evening at a banquet facility in the adjoining county. Our prom would be the first one utilizing this facility, which is still being used to this day for the local high school prom.

As hard as it could be for me to do many facets of the prom, it was something that I just did because my mother stressed it upon me as something that I would otherwise regret if I had not gone. As hard as it was for me to do, in the end, I made my mother proud and was even in the photo spread of the local newspaper the following week. I know that I made so proud.

Yes, there were things that were hard like the dancing, loud music, and having to socialize throughout the evening into the week of the morning, but I did it. I still to this day don’t know how, but it was done because there was no other way that I could escape what I had gotten into, and I wanted to satisfy my mother’s wishes and meet her expectations for my social inclination by doing something that she had intended to have me accomplish socially.

I now realize that I was fortunate to be able to attend the high school prom with all the general education classmates. Not everyone who is challenged in the way that I am will receive that opportunity, and for that I am thankful. While the world has more modernized to include special needs proms, as they are now commonplace in my community, nothing can ever replace how strong I was by taking that big leap and first asking someone to the prom and then actually doing all the mechanics that come with going to such a big event as the high school prom. It is an event that I always remember and will never forget even as life has changed for me in the current ages.