Markers

It was so good to chat with her last night. I always come away having learned something new. Toward the end of the conversation, it pulled me back into an old memory, from when we were expecting our son.

We got onto the topic of how selective he is socially, how long he takes to open up, not just with adults, but with other kids too.

When my wife was finishing her twentieth week of pregnancy, the doctor ran a markers test. Some of the markers suggested he might have Down syndrome. The doctor mentioned that if we wanted to make the legal cutoff for terminating the pregnancy, we’d need to run a more definitive test, one that involved rupturing the amniotic sac and carried real risk to both mother and baby.

My wife is a fighter. She immediately braced herself for a life devoted entirely to raising him, whatever that looked like. Her argument was simple: what was even the point of the test if we were already prepared to take on the upbringing? I saw it differently. I didn’t think this was something that would only affect him, it would shape the rest of our daughter’s life too. If we had to make a choice, I felt we needed to make it now, with full information. We went ahead with the test, and thankfully it came back negative. We both breathed a huge sigh of relief.

I sometimes wonder, though, whether things in the biological world are ever really that discrete, reducible to a single test or a single choice. His need for every corner of the bedsheet to hang perfectly even, for every toy to go back exactly where it belongs, those were some of the earliest signs of the quirks he’d grow into. He can focus for incredibly long stretches, notice details most people would miss entirely. He’s particular, stubborn in his own way. And he tends to keep his distance from people and kids alike.

Maybe I’m worried because of my own shortcomings, the things that make life unnecessarily hard, and I don’t want him carrying any of that. But like she said, I still have time, and I worry too much.