MOSAIC MOMENTS

When you are told that your child has Down syndrome or mosaic Down syndrome you immediately form an image in your mind. It could be a child you saw in school or down the street from your house that had special needs. Maybe you saw a TV show or movie about Down syndrome and that was your image. Or, maybe you had some medical background and you thought about all that you had read up on the subject. Whatever it was, I think everyone does form an image, and in most cases you discover that that image in your mind was completely opposite of the person your child has become.

For me, I imagined Scott. Scott was a boy in my elementary school who had some sort of delay that impaired his ability to communicate articulately and he had braces on his legs that clanged when he walked. Scott was unable to learn the way my other classmates learned and he invariably could not close his mouth completely which was unsightly during lunch. But these were not the things that bothered me about Scott at all. What bothered me is that his parents dressed him in black dress slacks, a white button up shirt complete with a plastic pocket protector for his pens, black dress shoes and black-framed eye glasses that slid down his nose despite the large roll of tape fastened to the middle. To me and my classmates, Scott was different because he dressed differently than the rest of us. If it were not for his clothes, we probably would have accepted him much easier.

So, my first thought, silly as it may sound, was that Tim would never dress differently than his peers!

But I know that many had other thoughts in their mind. Other fears that were unfounded later on. So, today, please share what those fears were. What did you worry about after you were told your child had Down syndrome or mosaic Down syndrome and what made you realize that those concerns were only because of the image you had formed in your mind?

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