Grandma Emmie & Michigan Purple

I may have mentioned or not, but like Mom and Dad, Grandma Emmie is not my Mother. Neither is she The Beloved's Mother. She is one of my very best friends. And a wonderful mother to her own now grown daughter. She was always so wonderful to My Girlie when she was born, and eventually to The Middle when he came along. She was just so much more than the Aunties who were not real Aunts. She was as wonderful and perfect to my Kidlets as my Mother would have been. Like a real Grandma would have been. But she wasn't older enough than I to be my mother. So, she got dubbed Aunt-Grandma. Over the years, I finally shortened it to Grandma M---E----, now Grandma Emmie for the sake of reading flow. And so she has been ever since!

So, the last phone call I had left to make was to my dear friend Grandma Emmie. I told her as simply as I could that The Baby was a boy and he would have Down syndrome. She was quiet for a bit and then asked gently, "Well, what are you going to do?" I told her that we were keeping him. She knew that. She's the one person I'd confided in, that I was sure as soon as I knew I was pregnant that he would have it.

Then she told me about a day she'd had to make up in college years ago. She had to spend an eight hour day at a group home for people with developmental disabilities. She said there were 8 people living there, from kids to young adult, and they all had Down syndrome. She was very encouraging as she described how impressed she'd been with their lives. They went about their normal day doing things normal people do. Making beds, Eating meals. Cleaning up after. Watching TV. Playing games. Talking over lunch. Washing dishes. Doing crafts. Reading books. Being a family. It made me feel better to hear her words because I knew she knew the fears in my heart. It gave me some hope that we'd be alright. "You are a strong person. You can do this. You aren't the first pregnant woman facing this news. There are others out there to help you. You will know what to do when the time comes." Her faith in me somehow gave me a little faith in myself.

I'd already called my on-line friend, Purple Rose, the one I'd confided in way back in March that I suspected I was pregnant, in the wee hours of this morning. She's been my friend-on-the-phone through thick and thin, through more late night work breaks and middle of the night chat fests than I could count. She'd visited with us for two weeks in March the previous year, and we'd been on-line friends since The Middle was just a few days old. I told her I'd gotten the amnio results. "And..." And it's a boy, I said. "Well, I already knew that. What else?" I told her he would have Down syndrome. She was quiet for a beat. I never know if she heard what I said, if she was thinking, or if she was looking for the next address she had to throw a paper to. "Well..." she finally says, "You already knew that, right?" She was encouraging. She said she knew we could do it. She said she was sure he'd be born healthy, to stop "going there!" She knows me too well.