Thoughts on Quest #4: Daughter Dare

I was tooling around on the internet and stumbled across the Down Syndrome Association of Minnesota. I found a bunch of very interesting articles that gave me a new perspective on daughter. This webpage about pace was very helpful, not only because it explained why daughter is the way she is sometimes, but because I felt I wasn't isolated in my frustrations.

After reading different articles on the page for a while, I realized that most of daughter's (for lack of a better words) bizarre behaviors are related to her unique way of coping with the world. She is intentionally slow at times because she is trying to cope with feeling overwhelmed. She talks to herself and her bouncy-ball toys because she lacks the internal monologue that I use when problem solving. She complains on vacation about missing school because she needs that routine for security.

Today while working on the scary room, I found husband's mother's will. Husband, daughter, and the teenager share the same mother, who passed away in 2001. Daughter was seven. In her will, the closing sentence was in reference to daughter, stating "I love her so much. What would we have all done without her?"

I feel a renewed sense of purpose in my motherhood of daughter. While I feel the teenager and I have had a good run, I fear I have not done well enough with daughter. To rephrase, the best days of our relationship are still ahead of us!


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