Tag: Disability

Why we have written our book, ‘Trudy And Me’

I am going to try to capture in this blog what our daily social media posts are trying to say about why we have written our book, ‘Trudy And Me’. There is currently a crowdfunding campaign to fund the printing of this book which has 9 days left. I want to describe the process to you so far of how the idea came about and why we have ended up with a campaign, particularly if you have been unable to come to either of our talks at Portobello and in Lanark.

It started way back at the beginning when Alex and I realised that messaging was really important to us. I had given birth to Trudy, and nobody had said ‘congratulations’. Admittedly, this was tainted by blue lights and worried paediatricians, but it dawned on us after all this that we had not heard those ubiquitous words so easily uttered to new parents of typical, healthy babies.

A week later, a thoughtful doctor finally said this to us and handed us a pack donated to the hospital which stated quite clearly, ‘congratulations on the birth of your new baby’ and a beautiful picture of a healthy, happy baby with Down’s Syndrome.

This was a positive statement and clear message that it was not all to be doom and gloom but that we were actually incredibly grateful that she had survived her first weak months in this world. It became apparent to me that this needed more leverage.

Alex has since spoken to midwives and health professionals about the importance of positive messaging at the beginning and I continued to look for this in other areas of life.

I was keen to explore children’s stories that represented children as children and not disability to read to Trudy’s brother, Patrick. There is very little representation of children with disabilities in literature and moreover very little positive representation.

I spoke to my friend Bridget about this, endless chats at the playground of frustrations around attitudes towards disability. Bridget had worked as an Occupational Therapist with adults with learning disabilities and had witnessed some of the negative and disabling behaviours we were discussing.

Bridget came back one evening with a poem, which captured the points perfectly – points about accepting and celebrating people for their differences, recognising that all people have their ups and downs and that people with Down’s Syndrome are not always happy!

She then began the mammoth task of illustrating the poem in watercolour. We chatted for a long time about the need for Trudy to look like Trudy and not a caricature, however brilliant the artist is. So, we enlisted the support of Jo Tennant, professional photographer and friend who took all the photos on this blog. We spent many a happy hour taking photos of our kids to use in the book. I’ve popped some at the bottom of this post.

The book was taking shape with the three of us learning from each other and building on each other’s strengths. We tried to approach publishers, but this was lockdown and publishers were taking fewer and fewer submissions, perhaps due to an increase in supply – who knows.

Five years after the birth of an idea, the book was ready to be printed. We started to explore the possibility of printing it ourselves so we could remain in control of the design, message and layout. Bridget spoke to a fellow parent at the line of a football pitch whilst watching their kids play and he mentioned that he was a graphic designer. Craig McIntyre then offered to digitalise our book so that we could get it to print. He sourced a printing company that could offer their services at a reasonable price.

We had all the necessary components, we just needed to fund the print costs as well as expenditure for postage, an ISBN number and fees. Our aim has always been to distribute this book to as many new parents, charities, libraries, schools and families as possible to reassure, inform and teach people about celebrating difference. We set the target at £20,000 to cover the printing of 2,500 copies as this was our only chance to print.

If you have read this far, we are absolutely overwhelmed by the donations and support offered to us by our friends and family to whom Trudy, Patrick, Bridget and her two children mean so much, but we want to make this project a reality and we need everyone’s help to do this.

Please check out our website: http://www.trudyandme.com and you can pledge your support at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/trudy-me-a-picture-book-celebrating-difference.

This has been a long labour of love and commitment to making the world a more positive place for all.

Thank you.

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A ticket to be trouble!

It is the October holidays and I have realised something about Trudy. She has a ticket to be trouble!

I have often written about visible versus invisible disability. Trudy wears her 47th chromosome on her face, which means that everyone knows she has Down’s Syndrome. Children are much better at dealing with this than adults are. Children often stop, take one look at Trudy and then seem to inherently understand that they need to give way to her. This is a powerful tool and one which I am pretty sure Trudy uses to her advantage!

I was watching her on a set of rides at our local shopping mall – we are mostly on the farm, so this was an attempt to introduce our children to the realities of modern life. She bounced from one ride to another, unaware that you could pay for them (the great parental deception) and sat in helicopters, submarines, cars, you name it. She jumped into every one, whether there was a child already there or not, popping up like a Jack in the box, causing the children in them to either stand firm or move slowly away and try another one. Very few stood firm.

Then I realised, I realised that Trudy had the power to part other children, to move them out of her way like skittles. She is a force of nature, all impulse, determined to reach her destination which at this point was the submarine on repeat.

Thankfully, she doesn’t push or shove (or I would have intervened) but she just appears with her great confidence and presence, her ‘I don’t care what you think of me’ attitude, and that seems to move people out of her way.

I wondered how this manifests itself at school, does she jump queues or skip lines? They tell us that she can wait, and that she understands. Patrick and her other little friends find her amusing, the way she can do all the things they want to do and somehow not get into trouble for it.

We will have to keep an eye on this, and that confidence will have to be tamed at some point but for now this 6-year-old is a ‘tackle her at your peril’ sort of girl. Long may this freedom last, the freedom to be who you want to be without judgement or someone telling her what she can and can’t do.

Our little wildling at the foot of the system.

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An incredible performance by Julia Hales

I know I haven’t posted for a while and Trudy has started school so there is lots to say but, as usual, I am trying to navigate the political tightrope which is having a daughter with a disability in mainstream.

Nevertheless, I went to see a performance last night. It was a great performance about Home & Away and Down’s Syndrome and I have to tell you about it.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. A woman with Down’s Syndrome had written and was performing her play at the Edinburgh International Festival. I so badly wanted this to be a show which paraded acting talents and didn’t focus solely on disability and it did, in spades.

But it did not hide from the fact that the writer and performers had Down’s Syndrome. It celebrated what Down’s Syndrome has to offer. There was Julia, who knew how to command an audience with presence and confidence, Josh who really knew how to dance and others in her entourage who spoke well, painted, who had understood the true reason we are all here, to love and be loved and, above all, to have fun doing it!

It reminded me of an incredible cafe in Ilkley, West Yorkshire which I visited when Trudy was just born. This is a cafe run by adults with learning disabilities called ‘Outside The Box’. The great selling point of this cafe is that everyone talks to each other! You will get to know the people sitting on the table next to you. There is no judgement and social norms seem to be quietly set aside whilst we engage with real people.

This was the same with the theatre. We were invited to participate and I could sense everyone’s surge of fear as Julia asked people to come up to the stage. But there was no judgement, no expectation. Julia herself forgot her lines occasionally, but she accepted her stumble and didn’t judge herself for it. That gave us all hope that we could do whatever we felt we wanted to do.

So I went to find the cast, to tell them that they were utterly inspiring. Julia, in her show, talks about two hospitals in Australia that were shut down the year she was born. These hospitals entrapped adults like her and treated them like animals. This backdrop has affected us all and makes us fight harder, grateful for the extended kindness to include our young ones in life.

But Trudy won’t know any of this. She will just see people like Julia being part of the festival on her own merit and not because of her disability. She will see people with Down’s Syndrome on the TV, on radio and in jobs and expectations for her will change.

I will be eternally grateful for people like Julia who push and challenge boundaries every day. It is much more than I can ever do writing my blog so grateful, as ever, for your reading this but please go out and see shows like these. You will have a fantastic night out!

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This girl can

There are two magical moments that I did not capture with a photo this holiday that shows that this girl really can.

There are plenty of moments that we don’t capture, that people don’t see but which are part of family life with Trudy.

We were recently on holiday in Balmedie, north of Aberdeen. Fifteen miles of beach which the poodle loved, and Patrick and Trudy returned to their roots to explore the sea and the sand, having grown up by the beach. Trudy ran and didn’t stop running, splashing in the waves and squeezing the wet sand between her fingers whilst our baby squirmed at the alien feeling of sand in her toes.

I’ve never seen her run so well, with solid ankles that took so long to straighten and required special boots for support, with straight legs that have become stronger and less hypotonic. She was in her element, literally.

But the moment that trumped all moments and shows how far she has come is when she tobogganed down the dunes. Yes, I said toboggan. We came across some children who were having a party in the dunes. Alex spoke to one of the dads who explained why they all had toboggans, and incidentally why there was one outside our holiday cottage. They were heading to the dunes to slide down them.

My heart was in my mouth as she ran across to the steepest dune, a good 20 metres off the ground and with a 85% gradient down to a puddle in the basin. We all stopped the consider the height, the steepness with our brains which fear and calculate risk so efficiently but stop us from ever doing anything. Trudy, all impulse, launched herself at the bottom of the dune and began to scale the heights. She scrambled against the sand until she got to the top. Meanwhile, we all started thinking she wouldnt get there, that it was impossible for a 6 year old with Down’s Syndrome to manage that. But when she did, Patrick ran up after her, Alex in tow to help her. Did she need help? Not in the slightest. She stood at the top, she managed the risk, watched her brother have a go then slid down on her bottom. Squeals of delight echoed across the dunes. She had achieved so much right then and she didn’t even need us to praise it. She was just glad she’d done what everyone else was doing

This is why this girl can, why so many underestimated young people can despite the assumptions we make based on their perceived ability. The desire to be part of a group can be strong motivation indeed to overcome the greatest of challenges.

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A ‘thank you’ to a community

Almost four years ago, my friends and I decided to publish a book. It started with an innocent conversation in our local bar about a really frustrating book I had just read to Patrick, to help him come to terms with having a sister with Down’s Syndrome. I won’t mention the book to protect the identity of the author, but it was negative despite an overall positive message. The father was in tears because their baby had DS, the sister thought she would never be able to do anything with them, you get the picture. Instead of reassuring Patrick, it sparked a hundred questions that, at the time, I was not ready to answer.

My friends and I talked about a book which would encourage children not to fear difference as it is this fear which has led to so many examples of discrimination in adults. Bridget (writer and illustrator) and I had worked with people with learning disabilities of various kinds, and had experienced firsthand the type of injustice which exists because people are too quick to judge. As parents, we have also experienced the looks and the sideways glances, the uncomfortable questions. We talked about a book which accepted every stage of development. If Trudy wasn’t walking yet, it was okay. She’d get there. If she wasn’t talking, we were all learning to sign to help her on her way.

Bridget went away and wrote a poem which encapsulated everything we wanted to say. It would educate, inform, give top tips for how to explain DS to young children but, above all, present life as normal. We needed photos because we didn’t want a caricature of a child with DS taking away the authenticity of the poem. Jo (photographer) took photos of Patrick and Trudy. We spent many an afternoon trying to get them in the right position! Bridget has then spent the last few years illustrating the poem, in spite of a global pandemic and home-schooling, with beautiful scenes of Portobello, Edinburgh where our children spent the first few years of their lives.

Portobello was the town that welcomed us and took us in. It was where Trudy was born, where a good friend looked after Patrick whilst I went to the hospital with premature labour pains, only to give birth a couple of days later. It was the place that surrounded us with offers of help as we juggled life in hospital. It supported us gently as we got used to having a child who developed so slowly we didn’t know whether she would ever walk or talk. I have so many memories of Trudy shuffling up and down the prom at Portobello before she could walk, exploring the sand in the only way our little sensory being can do and dancing her heart out in her heavy-soled Piedro boots to the live music at the Big Beach Busk.

It seems perfectly fitting that this book was written and illustrated in this place where so much acceptance happened, where we learned that support can take many forms; from the lady in the jewellery shop, the man in the grocery store, Bob the butcher and the library, to name but a few. They know who they are.

So, once again, our community are coming to our aid and a local Portobello graphic designer is helping us put together the digital version of the book so that we can self-publish. On the eve of World Down’s Syndrome Day 2022 and with so much that has happened over the last two years, we celebrate achievement for people who are different and recognise the huge amount of support that families like ours have received from the doctors and nurses who kept our daughter alive to the butcher who never forgot to say hi to her.

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A rare moment of sibling appreciation

There are few more precious moments than when a brother says openly and unreservedly how much he loves his sister. These statements don’t come easily so I’d better write this one down!

We have been on holiday this week and it has been a great opportunity for Patrick and Trudy to play together and discover each other again, along with their baby sister.

Playing with Trudy can be frustrating because she is hugely repetitive. She gets hold of an idea then clings to it like a limpet until it’s fully assimilated in her brain. This is much like most children but with Trudy, this process is longer. Trudy will repeat the same role-play with anything; cars, dolls, fruit, pebbles, you name it.

It goes something like this: “Hi, what’s your name?” “Car [or pebble depending on the object” “Play?” “Okay” “Park?”

It is pretty brief but, looking at this on paper, it seems to cover all the basic elements of a friendly interaction: greeting, question, invitation to play.

We all went slightly mad with Trudy’s monologue at the river which required some response from us. That went something like this: “Daddy, look!” “What’s that, Trudy?” “A potato. No, daddy, not a potato. A rock!” She must have said that at least 20 times when we were throwing stones in the river, or was she throwing potatoes? Who knows! It was funny the first time but the humour wore off as we had already heard the punch line!

For Patrick, he’s got to be patient, he’s got to be understanding, he’s got to care about the safety and well-being of his little sister ALL the time because we rarely take our eyes off her.

But there are those wonderful moments when Trudy transfers her play to the real world and asks every passer-by “what’s your name?”, and she will invariably get the reply “what’s yours?”.

We have met Steve and Rob who were walking to Ribbleshead, Mowgli the dog, whose owners have a narrow boat in Skipton, Glynn who was going up Buckden Pike the wrong way. I could go on.

Trudy inspires friendships and pushes interactions you might never have without her and there is a silent recognition from us all that we owe these to her.

So in one brief moment, Patrick, with his ability to get straight to the heart of the matter, stated quite plainly and unprompted that he likes his sister’s Down’s Syndrome, that Trudy wouldn’t be Trudy without it.

Her ‘condition’ was not something he wanted to take away, he wasn’t wishing for something else unattainable. He was grateful for it. I’d like to say that he was grateful for the confidence it brought her, for her eminent likeability because we were all benefitting from it.

So let me savour this moment, describe it, document it, relish it, because some days are tough and these precious moments of gratitude are hard won but worth every battle.

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What is disabling our daughter?

It is a powerful word, ‘disabling’. By its own definition, it would mean that someone who is ‘disabled’ lacks the ability to do anything. That is quite a frightening prospect for anyone.

But it is the process of ‘disabling’ which really interests me. Someone or something must have been the source of the disability. Is it the condition itself that forces the person in a wheelchair, or the rampless bus which the person can’t board, or is it the people who stare at the limbless man, the almond eyes, the slurred speech? What or who is disabling?

Our daughter, Trudy, had low muscle tone when she was younger, a condition associated with that extra chromosome which keeps rearing its ugly head. She couldn’t sit in standard wooden high chairs (popular in restaurants and pubs) without sliding through it like jelly and there was no chance we were going to feed her safely. So, we had to phone ahead to make sure that they had a plastic high chair with a cushioned insert and a bar between the legs. These were specific requests but, if they didn’t have one, we couldn’t go.

Trudy wanted to start gymnastics but we had to get a letter from her paediatrician to say that it was safe for her (appointments with paediatricians are not easy to get). She wanted to do dance classes but she had to wear tap shoes. Has anyone tried to get a hypotonic ankle into a tap shoe?! We started swimming lessons but the instructor said that we couldn’t go in with her because she was in the higher age group. I stated quite politely that she would drown if we didn’t go in with her. Needless to say, he let me in then. And then there’s childcare. We can’t just send Trudy to a holiday camp or a babysitter without having an in-depth conversation first in which we dissect and analyse Trudy’s needs.

Some of these things have to be in place to make sure our daughter is safe, like the paediatrician’s letter and the pre-activity chats. But the smart-looking high chair that doesn’t support the baby or indeed the backless swing at the park lead us to a swift conclusion: We can’t go out.

We can’t go to the playground because our child will just have to sit there watching the other children play, and that’s not fair. Have you ever wondered why there are few disabled people in parks? Lack of accessible equipment is a major factor.

We can’t go to the cafe because they don’t have the right equipment to feed our child safely.

We can’t go to that concert because our children can’t queue or stand the noise.

Or very sadly, we can’t go out because they’ll stare.

So, what is disabling our daughter? Well, it’s a combination of things. Her Down’s Syndrome prevents her from understanding, which means basic excursions are a challenge. The wrong equipment or the crowded places are an issue. But for the people who stare, who don’t understand that she is finding it difficult to wait or really doesn’t want to move, well, they’ve really no excuse in my opinion.

A person feels disabled when they can’t access the most basic of places such as the bus or the shops. So the buses have ramps and the shops have wheelchair-friendly trolleys, but not always. Blue badge users can park closer to shops but, who hasn’t been guilty of parking in a disabled spot when in a hurry?

A person feels disabled when there are too many barriers to doing what they want to do, like dance or gymnastics or swimming. Parents give up because there are just too many forms to fill in and nobody seems to read them anyway.

A person feels disabled when normal avenues are not available to them such as mainstream education or employment. Children are turned away from schools because they will be ‘detrimental to other children’*. Adults can’t get jobs because it requires just too much effort to adapt the workplace for a wheelchair user or a person with learning difficulties.

There is some great work out there and some great legislation around disability rights but, perhaps if we started considering the possibility that people are not ‘disabled’ but ‘enabled’, we might not assume what they can’t achieve and start concentrating on what they can.

*Standards in Scottish Schools Act, 2000

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Why do I feel like I have to say ‘thank you’?

It’s the same feeling everywhere I go, at the park, at the pool, in cafes or at the supermarket.

If someone is nice to our daughter, doesn’t walk away, lets their children play with her or lets her take everything off the shelves in Tescos, I feel inclined to say ‘thank you’.

Thank you for allowing her to be herself, thank you for making my life easier, thank you for including her in your games.

Trudy is heading for her first year of primary school and I find myself feeling incredibly grateful that her mainstream school will accept her. Despite the reams and reams of legislation and rights-based discourse that I know like the back of my hand, I still want to say ‘thank you’.

Why is that? Is it because I know too much about what has gone before, when people with disabilities were shut away, disabled and disempowered? Is it because there are thousands of cases across the UK where children with learning disabilities are still not accepted into mainstream on the misguided assumption that they will be ‘detrimental to their peers’? Or, if they are accepted, it is with reluctance and lack of understanding. A child with DS was wearing a hi-viz jacket in one mainstream school because he was a flight risk. He may as well have ‘watch out for me’ written all over him, and not in a good way.

We are so eminently glad that Trudy’s rights to an equitable education are being upheld but I wonder when we are going to stop feeling grateful. Grateful for the opportunity to be part of society when her brother just is. Grateful for the chance to learn with and from her peers. Grateful to have peers.

I’ll remember to write again when I no longer need to say ‘thank you’, when her journey to acceptance is not shrouded in worry and doubt. Let’s hope this and so many other stories end well, that our children grow up as integral parts of our diverse and rich communities of people.

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How a typical child develops (from observation, experience and a little background knowledge!)

Watching a typical child develop is a bittersweet reminder of how Trudy’s development differed and differs.

Trudy and Patrick now have a little sister, a lockdown baby who has never seen anyone except her immediate family and grandparents, and knows her buggy much better than her car seat!

I watch her develop every day, learning to gain command of her limbs, the cogs in her typical brain turning to bang and hit and grasp her toys. She moves her body to discover what she can and can’t do, and what she still needs to learn.

It reminds me of Trudy’s first years, a floppy, hypotonic baby whose brain struggled to process everything at the same time. She would babble away (because Trudy loves to chat), but her physical development would stall.

She sat up on her own at 1, stood up independently at 2 and a half and walked at 3. Trudy is 5 now and she’s running.

Her baby sister will probably crawl before she’s 1 and be walking before 2.

And this is not that large a gap compared to some children but it reminds us of the difference between the way Trudy learns and how she will never follow a typical development pattern.

Trudy’s sister will learn through osmosis, through a combination of watching and learning, her innate faculties processing every little thing subconsciously then acting upon them with conscious and deliberate movement. She bangs herself on the head with a toy, she does it a second time and then doesn’t do it again.

A typical brain will absorb the concept of consequences much more easily than a child with learning difficulties, even if the child hasn’t experienced the consequence, so that the typical child will not wander far from home or run across a car park.

Most consequences we talk about are largely linguistic in that respect, “don’t climb too high or you’ll fall”, “don’t run across the road or you’ll get run over”, “don’t put your fingers in the fire or you’ll get burnt”. You say something like that to Trudy and all she hears is “put your fingers in the fire”!

Trudy will always need support to understand what she should and shouldn’t do, but with the right use of language, she can begin to process the world on a subconscious level, to inherently learn to be safe and independent of us.

There is research happening all the time on how to develop our young people’s independent living skills and ultimately make them less vulnerable. To make them safe, healthy and happy: Such simple aims to which we all have a right, and it should never be forgotten that some of us have the natural privilege to be.

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How our daughter with Down’s Syndrome changed my outlook

As I lay in the bath (yes, hear me out..), I watched the little islands of bubbles attach themselves to each other, and I was reminded of how simply a life and lives can be altered when just one chromosome decides not to divide. It’s amazing what you think of in the bath!

The process is called meiosis, from the Greek meaning ‘lessening’ and I love to know the origins of words! During meiosis, cells divide to produce gametes which can be the sperm or the egg. The egg contains unpaired chromosomes in its nucleus and these pair ever so romantically with the matching chromosome in the sperm to form a typically developing embryo.

Down’s Syndrome occurs when the 21st chromosome fails to separate in either the egg or the sperm, and approaches the encounter as a pair already, creating three 21st chromosomes. And we all know three is a crowd…

Like the bubbles in the bath clinging to each other, those 21st chromosomes had refused to divide and, from its conception, had created an imbalance in the egg that would turn into a child who would never develop in any typical way but grow uniquely and surprisingly. She would carry the traits of a child with Down’s Syndrome; the low-set ears, the flat nose and the almond shaped eyes. She would take her time to learn to walk and find it difficult to use language, although she would be sensitive to tone and intonation like nobody else I know.

This one random event in the development of an embryo has distorted the development of a life and affected us in ways I would never have imagined.

Being the parent of Trudy has its challenges but having her has changed me for the better.

First of all, there is writing. I used to write for writing’s sake, creative pieces and lots of nonsense, and now I have a reason to write.

Academic achievement has always been important to me and I would always want the same for our children because I have derived so much pleasure from study and learning. But what happens when an academic path is not available to one of our children? Having Trudy has forced me to reevaluate not only what is important for her but also what is important for all our children. And learning does not only occur in academia. The pleasures and small joys of life like sitting around the dinner table with family or friends, learning from them and learning from the great environment around us are enough to allow us to live full and contented lives, and isn’t this what we are all striving for?

I realised today that I had high hopes for our children. I want them to make great change, to affect other people’s lives in unique and interesting ways. And you don’t necessarily need degrees to do that!

Trudy may not learn to write extensive essays or solve multiple equations, but she will, with our help and support, learn to be a genuine part of society, earning her own money and living as independently as is possible.

Despite some confidence now, I was always quite shy as a girl and the prospect of having a child who makes the most noise in the playground, who talks to anyone and everyone, who wears her condition so unashamedly on her face and in her mannerisms, would have filled me with dread.

So, has this one random event of chromosomal nondivision made me a better person, a better mother? Well, I think it has.

I have more manageable expectations of our children, of myself. I take pride in the smallest of achievements and don’t sweat the small stuff. I revel in her uniqueness and our uniqueness as a family as a consequence.

These children and people are indeed ‘special’ but not for reasons of difference or impaired ability, but because they impact our lives in ways nobody else does. They force us to challenge fastheld opinions about how we should and shouldn’t behave and change our lives for the better.

We all know how Down’s Syndrome (Trisomy 21) occurs but nobody knows why. I’m not sure if these things happen for a reason but we make the best of our situation and sometimes what seems devastating at a time can be turned to an advantage.

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