What It Feels Like To Be Hit In The Face With A Shovel [Part 6]

This is PART 6 of my reflections about when my daughter who has Down syndrome was born.

You get to re-author your story too.  It is yours after all.  It’s sacred.  It’s beautiful.  It’s personal.  And it belongs to you.  Nobody else.

Don’t let anybody write stories on you.  When the story they tell about you is that you can’t do something.  Rewrite it.  When the world tells you that you should give up.  Rewrite it.  When the discourse is that having a child with a disability is an awful, horrible very bad thing.  Rewrite it.

Be warned, when you decide to do this, sometimes it’s going to seem like an uphill battle.  It requires unlearning a lot of stuff.  In my case, I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about intellectual disabilities.  People with Down syndrome are just that…. People.  My daughter’s Down syndrome is not who she is.  Isabelle is beautiful, funny, smart, and incredibly loving.

This stuff I’m talking about is called lots of things – therapeutic conversations, re-authoring, narrative therapy…. But the basics are all the same.  It starts with YOU telling YOUR story.

But be patient with yourself and with others.  Most likely people in your life have been told the same negative stories you once were.  So keep telling your story until people hear it.  Changing a narrative is a little like building a campfire.  You don’t just suddenly drop a huge log on a flame and expect it to catch fire. You build it one twig at a time; each time your tell your new story, your fire is getting bigger.

In the end, it came down to a choice… being hit in the face with a shovel or being knocked over with a love so strong I couldn’t even stay standing

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to pick love over a shovel to the face any day.