Reassurance

I almost can’t talk about Liam — at church, anyway — without having someone try to soothe my feelings. (No matter how happy I am.)

About 3 weeks ago he developed stranger anxiety. Although not all babies ever start freaking when a stranger is near (or picks them up), it’s a sign that they are drawing distinctions, so it’s a developmental milestone. The next week I bragged on him at church to Mrs. X. She reassured me that it was a good thing!

Well, yes.

Or, there’s Mrs. Y. She told me that before long Liam would be doing some other developmental thing.

I said, “I don’t think he will.” (It was something that doesn’t fit his personality. I don’t remember what.)

She said, brightly, “Well then he won’t!”

I knew exactly what she meant: that I should take comfort about that he would do this thing; or if I wouldn’t take that, I should take comfort that it was OK that he wouldn’t.

Then there’s Miss Z, who apologized for saying Liam might be normal in some developmental way, because that implied he might not be completely normal, and who are we to say what is normal, and maybe him having Down syndrome was no worse than our usual little foibles or petty neuroses, and –

I’ll be kind and assume this is all well meant — and point out that it’s just not helpful. If you feel the need to comfort someone, you might first check whether that someone looks distraught. And even if he does…

Let him have his sadness. Even if he didn’t need to feel it — and I sure did, those first few weeks of knowing about Liam’s Down syndrome — you couldn’t stop him. If you don’t need to be around it, you can greet him later. If you don’t need to be protected from his sadness, then just be there with it.

If it’s there. So far, every time someone tries to reassure me that Liam will be just fine, it’s at a time when I’m not sad at all about him. For the very good reason that I’m almost never sad about him — unless I was just looking at a baby of similar age doing much more than he is. Or hearing my friend X-prime talk about how his girl of the same age is almost up to doing vector calculus. I exaggerate slightly.

Thing is, sadness doesn’t go away when you cover it up. If you succeeded in getting your friend to bottle it up, you’d be turning legitimate grief into long-term melancholy. Better to hope you’d fail!

Probably the best reaction I’ve gotten from anyone in this regard was in those first few weeks, when my colleague Glenn Buck mentioned to me an “early learning” center he’s involved with. I told him I wasn’t sure what Liam would need, because he was going to be riding the short bus. (Internationals among us: American school districts commonly have a miniature bus for taking mentally handicapped students to special classes. And, no, I don’t know that he can’t be put in regular classes. It was October 2008, and I was still a little dazed.)

Dr. Buck said, “That’s OK. We take students of different ability levels.”

That is, he didn’t try to fix me. He just showed me what he had to offer — that there might be ways to help Liam. I’d way rather have that than fluffy words.

Or Dr. DeClair. He spoke with gentleness, and offered to put me in touch with a colleague of his with a DS child. (If we hadn’t already known pretty well the parents of a one-year-old DS girl, I’d have been on the phone that night to his colleague.)

Or Mr. Minter. “God’s special children,” he called DS people, when I first told the Knights council. Not something I wanted to hear, exactly, because it tells me Liam’s different. But it also tells me that God cares. The bad and the good. I can live with that.

Is it a man thing? No man has tried to comfort me; only women. (No, that’s not true. One man did.) But I don’t think it’s a man thing anyway. I’ve seen women before react with annoyance when people tried to stop them from feeling what they felt.

In any case . . . maybe my best approach now is not to continue to squirm away from this advice, but to say, “It’s OK, really. I don’t need reassurance. Your good wishes are all we want — and it’s clear we have them. Thank you!”

And . . . the best reaction was the one we got from family (OK, not the this-isn’t-happening reaction, but the other), and from one of my high-school teachers, and from so many others:

“Oh, he’s so cute! Can I hold him?”

To which the reply now will probably be: We’ll have to consult him. Stranger anxiety’s kicking in. It’s a developmental thing. Liam, you want to go over and say hi? You lean forward when you want to go and turn away when you don’t. You’re developing communication, too.

Cool.

This post first appeared on my blog, Letters to Liam.