This might sound silly, or even ignorant, coming from someone who is going to be a pediatrician, but I think that one of the things I least understood before I saw a lot of newborn babies and their families was how parents handle having a baby with a congenital disability, like Down's syndrome for example.
When you're childless and thinking about your theoretical future parent self, the idea of having a baby with a disability from day one seems very scary. I can remember having many discussions, before and after starting medical school, about whether or not I or the person I was talking to would choose to keep a baby, knowing that he or she would be born with a bad disease.
But one of the things I've really only internalized in the last couple of years is that, in the end, your baby is just your baby, and there's exactly the same amount of love between a parent and a baby, regardless of what disabilities, physical or mental, that baby is born with. A child is just a child, and that child will grow at his own pace, into his own body, and will just be the person he is, with the parents and problems he has, forever.
I don't know why it's taken me so long to understand this, but it has. And now I do, which is nice.
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