Mom

Child,
Again we hear your heart beating. Last time it was a wonderful, nervous sound. This time it is steady pounding. Your heart is strong and true. “There he is,” I announced at the first echo. My sincere apologies if you are my beautful girl.

I can’t imagine any person with a heart so strong could be anything less than perfect. We are offered a battery of tests that would give us information about your inner space: do you have abnormal chromosomes, spinal cord problems or other concerns? The midwife gives us perspective, “Think about what you would do with the information.” The implication here is whether or not we would consider terminating the pregnancy and that fierce heart beating.

We accept no tests. You will arrive as you do and we will surround you in love.

Last night I visited with a six year old boy with Down Syndrome. He doesn’t speak, he sees the world by spinning it in his hands and he smiles like the sun. Most of my adult life I have worked with people born with developmental disabilities. I know better than most how difficult that life can be. And how magical. I can’t imagine telling the hundreds of people I’ve met over the years that I don’t value them, that I wish they’d never been born.

Do I hope you’re perfect? Yes, I do. Are you? I think so.

You will arrive as you do and we will surround you in love.

pa-

Child,
I’ve been thinking again about teaching, about how much you will learn from the shape of my shoulders and the blade of my voice. I know that I am shaped of habits that I was never taught. They are my blue collar blood. They are hard in my wiring. They are the enduring concern that bills won’t get paid and that without work I am less a man.

When I first heard of you I worried that I had no house for you. I don’t know why I thought you wanted a house.

I don’t want you to see me working a job. I don’t want you to see me being worked by a job. I don’t want you to be shaped of my failed ambitions or my economic anxiety. I will provide for you, but I will not crush myself in the process. You will need food, but you also need to see that work is play for grown ups and that if you can imagine it, you can make it real.

The other night I was a stranger in a room of artists. They were young and maybe carefree, designers, free-lancers, jack-of-all-trades. They quit good jobs to make art, to wear their slippers to work, to be near their families. No one told them they couldn’t.

Damn straight.

pa-