On occasion, I am asked to speak with parents who don't
already have children with Down syndrome but want to adopt a child
with Down syndrome. A couple of years ago, I spoke with a kind, extremely
well-educated and bright mom on the phone, trying to talk through some
concerns she and her husband had about a beautiful little girl from China. The
social worker who was writing their home study had filled their heads with
horror stories about kids with Ds and insisted they should seek a healthy child
instead. She didn't feel like the social worker really knew what she was
talking about and had sought advice from an experienced parent (but got me
instead).
As the conversation went on, she asked a question about "Down syndrome children." She quickly corrected herself and said, "I meant children with Down syndrome." Just as quickly, I laughed and told her it was no big deal.
She then relayed that she had already received ugly private
emails from the People First brigade in response to her VERY FIRST POST on the
Reece's Rainbow Yahoo group where she had made the apparently fatal mistake of
asking a question and not using People First-approved terminology.
A wonderful family, who did not already have a child with Down
syndrome, committed to adopting a little girl and had some questions as a
result of inaccurate information given to them by a social worker. Rather
than surrounding this family with love, support and accurate information, she
was shot down for not using the right jargon.
As parents of children with Down syndrome (see, I can use it
properly), we must be willing to show some grace to those who don't have access
to the preferred way of speaking about our children. As my wise friend Ashley always reminds me, nothing will shut down a
person's interest in our kids, in adoption, in whatever arcane place we hang
our hat, than being censured for speech.
They never adopted the little girl. The shunning from people who should have known better, in tandem with the social worker's bleak forecast for their future, was too much.
(Two
years ago, during Down Syndrome Awareness Month, I posted a different version
of today's blog post. So if it seems familiar...)
1 comment:
I have been thinking about this post, and I am thinking that the Down's Syndrome community is like many other professional and non-professional communities, that use a specific jargon and expect everyone, who appears, to internalize that jargon. It's liek the Christianese spoken on some forums, the Yiddish thrown in by us Ashkenazi Jews when we talk, the 3 letter abberviations so popular in IT... A newcomer needs to be able to learn them before they can be expected to use them, but unlike IT guys, people in the DS community are emotionally invested and find it personally offensive when an outsider enters their circles and shows this uninitiatedness.
Post a Comment