How Did We Get Into This Mess? Down Syndrome is "Hell on Earth."

[KamaAina]

31. Dear New Parents of a Baby With Down Syndrome, I Feel Compelled to Tell You This

This just turned up in my FB feed. What exquisite timing!

http://themighty.com/2015/01/dear-new-parents-of-a-baby-with-down-syndrome-i-feel-compelled-to-tell-you-this/

If you’ve found this place, you may have just discovered that your baby has Down syndrome. You’re likely standing at a fork in the road. Whether your baby has been born yet or not, you’ll need to make choices now, in action or thought, that will change you forever....

What’s done is done. Down syndrome has entered your life and that will never change, no matter what happens down the road. For that, I consider us connected. No matter what the future holds, what twists and turns your life follows, we will always have that in common. You are not alone.

My baby was in my arms when I discovered his Down syndrome. In a flash, all I thought I ever knew fell away. I didn’t know how to continue. No one had written me a script. No one had told me what lay ahead. I thought I stood at the edge of a vast, terrifying wilderness with nothing. I was so wrong.

Instead, it felt more like shedding a skin. I shed old ideas, thoughts, assumptions that I’d accepted as truth, only to emerge a truer, clearer self. Shedding that skin was intense and painful for me yet so necessary to reveal the next person I would become. I had no script because I wasn’t meant to have one. I was writing it as I went along, and each time I shed a new skin, I add to my narrative. I’ve only been at this for a short time so far; I have a lot of work ahead of me, that I know.