Chewymom

Thank you so much Gem, for providing me something to blog about today! I really am wondering how in the heck I’m going to keep this up for 31 days. But here we go–day seven.

Gem asked, “As I’ve read your Downs posts and realized that your first child was the one with Downs, I have wondered how you approached each upcoming birth of the following children. Were you worried that you would end up with another Downs baby or did you just figure that you handled it once and could handle it again?”

When DS16 was born, I was 24 years old. I had no idea ahead of time that he would have Down syndrome, so it all came as quite a shock to me. After the fact, I read the statistics and saw that the odds of me having DS16 were 1 in 2400, or something close to that. I asked around and learned that once you have already had a child with Down syndrome, your odds go up to 1 in 100.

Once you have had a child with special needs, you begin to meet all kinds of other people like yourself–through therapies, in the mall, through advocacy groups, and nowadays, online. As I met more and more people, I did not find a single one who had more than one child with Down syndrome. I figured that it was just crazy that I was the 1 in 2400 that first time–surely I’d be in that 99 in 100 group the next.

When I got pregnant the second time, I did not have testing done. At that time, they still wanted you to get the AFP test, which was not really designed as a test for Down syndrome and tended to not be terribly reliable. We looked carefully at the ultrasound, but that was about it.

Another big thing for me was that Down syndrome, which had been an unknown to me, now had a face. It wasn’t this terrible thing. Sure, there were difficulties. I mean, at the time that I learned I was pregnant with DS15, DS16 was less than a year old. He was nowhere close to walking or talking. But he was thriving and healthy, and he brought joy to our lives just as any baby would. Maybe moreso in some ways, because each milestone he reached was something he had to fight for. Seeing his determination and will to learn was inspiring, even at a young age!

Ultimately though, I think the real answer as to why I wasn’t afraid is grace. Looking from the outside, people often think that they could never handle having a child with special needs. They try to make me out to be a saint or a special person. I’m not. I’m just me. God gave me the grace to handle my child and the peace to go through several more pregnancies, because I was the one who needed that grace at the time. Just as he comes alongside the person who loses a spouse or who learns that he has cancer. The battle can still be hard, but when you ARE that person, God can come beside you and help bear the burden in a supernatural way that does not make sense to those who are not experiencing what you are. So the real reasons I was able to go through more pregnancies without fear are because God showed me that Down syndrome was not some scary thing, and He gave me a supernatural peace that even if He did allow me to have another child with an extra chromosome, He would also give me the grace to handle whatever He sent my way..

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Down syndrome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.