The Anonymous Comment

I read something today that made me so angry I wanted to hurl! I stopped breathing and felt my heart pounding on my chest.

What I read was a comment that an Anonymous person made on someone else's blog. That blog is written by a mother of two beautiful girls, one who has Down syndrome. The comment this Anonymous person left was the most negative, offensive and hateful thing I have ever read. Just thinking about it again makes my skin crawl.

The gist of the comment went something like this:

"Your baby is not beautiful and perfect. You had a retard baby and in ancient times they would have thrown it off a cliff. You aren't self less for having this baby but selfish for not getting tested before hand. This baby will drain our resources and potentially breed, creating more bad genes in the human species. All you want is attention for having this retard baby and your husband probably just wants to kill himself."

So...okay. WTF?! My first reaction was intense hatred back! How could someone say such horrible things? Is it possible that people like this still exist in our society? And one day Miles might come in contact with people like this? How am I ever going to protect him from that?

I'm not. I can't. All I can do is continue to let him be who he is and allow him to teach others to open their hearts to him. If they choose to.

So I freaked out.....and then I took a deep breath and then another and another. And then I thought about all the horrible events in our history that have stemmed from hateful people. Slavery, The Holocaust and Sept. 11 come to mind. What about all the people who still to this day commit atrocities which they see just, for one reason or another? They exist, they are out there and they like to be heard. And although the Mama Bear in me would like to fight back, insult and hurt those kinds of people, the humanist in me says, "Fight them with Love."
I know it sounds cheesy, but I also know it's true.

Miles is a bundle of joy and love. And if one does not see it, then I think it's because they are very afraid of what's inside themselves. I believe Miles, and other people with Special Needs and who are "different", hold up a mirror to us and make us see who we really are. That Anonymous person must really hate himself to write such horrible things. The fact that a baby with Down syndrome can make him/her feel such disdain means to me that this person lives their life feeling inadequate and fearful all the time. I mean, to put up such a wall of hatred, you kind have to be lacking in Love completely, and that's actually really sad.

After thinking about it some more, I felt very sad for this Anonymous person and I sent him some love. Yes, it's silly, but maybe it will work. I would much rather kill someone with my Love than continue the cycle of hatred. Because I believe that we are all connected and what is in one person surely exists in another. We all have the capacity to love and hate in the same way, it's just a matter of circumstances and how we choose to react to them. Well, I choose to turn something negative into something positive.

We are all the same after all. To truly accept others, we need to accept ourselves. And from what that Anonymous person wrote, it seems to me like he/she doesn't love and accept himself at all!

Well, I hope to teach Miles to love and accept himself for who he is, no matter what people say and do . I am aware that there are many mean spirited people out there and they will hurt my child at one point or another, just like they have already hurt me. But I will not let them break his spirit, for his joy and love is here to spread!