Granddaughter's a Rare Gem

The Boston Herald

I will have to apologize to her someday. I will have to tell my grandchild that I cried the day she was born.

Not immediately. Not when I first held her and she looked into my eyes and I looked into hers. There's a picture of this. Lucy, just minutes old, almost saying hello. I never shed a tear in her first 12 hours of her life when I thought she was USDA-approved top-of-the-line perfect Grade A baby girl. Then I was all smiles. I called my friends and said the baby has come. Lucy is here. Lucy is perfect - round cheeks, red lips, downy skin, blond hair, blue eyes.

We joked with her father, ``Where are those Sicilian genes?'' We hugged one another. We were so lucky. We got our miracle, we exclaimed. And there was no doubt that we had. 

And then a doctor walked over to the bed where Lucy lay and he unwrapped her and inspected her. And he said the word test. And then he said Down syndrome.

We cried then. All of us. Instantly. Because what had been perfection just seconds before, what had been all joy and gladness and light, became, with two little words, imperfection and fear.

Stupid, stupid us.

How will I tell Lucy that we wept while holding her? How will I explain that in those first few hours we looked at the gift God created just for us and wanted him to make it a better gift. To fix it. To make our little Lucy just like everyone else. There's been some mistake, God. This isn't what we prayed for.

But isn't it?

Give us a baby to love, we begged and we have her and what sweeter, better, bonnier baby could there be?

People told us that it's only natural to grieve the loss of a dream. And that's what I like to think we did. We dreamed one Lucy, the perfect little girl - like Margaret walking with her mother, like Shiloh on the stage in her toe shoes.

In those first few hours it was this dream that tormented us. And it blinded us, too, because all we could see was what Lucy wouldn't be. Here she was, infinity in our arms, fresh from heaven, in such a hurry to get to us that she arrived two weeks early. And we were judging her.

She left the angels to come here. She gave up paradise for us. And we cried.

Funny thing is she hardly cried. She opened her eyes and took us in, one at a time, and amazingly she didn't seem disappointed at all.

One in 800 babies is born with Down syndrome. The rarer the jewel, the more value it has. That's the way it works with things - with pearls and Lottery tickets and horses and art. 

But in our world and in our culture, we like our people to be all the same.

How will I tell her that I wanted her to be just like everyone else? That I was afraid of different when it's what's different that stands out? Are the black sand beaches in Hawaii sad because they're not soft and white? Do four-leaf clovers ache to be three? Does the life that grows above the tundra wish it were rooted in a valley instead?

The red rocks of Utah. Icebergs. The Lone Cypress. The Grand Canyon. And Lucy Rose.

We expected our life with Lucy to be lived on paved highways with well-marked signs, the rest stops never far from one another. Lucy is taking us down a different road, a blue highway, instead. It's scary not knowing what's ahead. But no one, even on the wide smooth roads, knows the future.

We yearn for paradise. Lucy just came from there. She is heaven in our arms. We didn't see this with tears in our eyes. But we see it now.