I’ve been told my whole life how much I look like my mom. My features and coloring predominantly favor my mom’s side of the family. In fact, when I was in third grade, we had a project where we were to bring in a picture of our parent as a baby so that everyone could see and guess whose parent baby picture belonged to which student. My mom taught at my elementary school, and my third grade teacher approached her and told her I had misunderstood the assignment. My teacher thought I brought in a picture of myself as a baby, when in fact it WAS a picture of my mom. That’s how similar our baby pictures were – it was difficult to tell the difference between the two of us!
It’s such a compliment that people tell me I look like my mom. While recently traveling, my sister just sent me a text that said people kept asking if she and my mom are sisters. And people aren’t asking in the joking-to-be-nice-and-also-awkwardly-flirting kind of way, they’re honestly asking. This either means my sister looks about 20 years older than she is (sorry BB), or my mom looks 20 years younger than she is. It’s definitely the latter, that my mom that looks young – my siblings and I joke that both of our parents are freeze-framed in time at age 40.
As you might imagine, a million thoughts ran through my mind in the hours following Regan’s diagnosis. Admittedly, one of the vainest fears I had was that Regan wouldn’t look like me and Mitch, that her features would favor Down syndrome more than they favored ours. Of course, these thoughts became second to the priority of her health and the focus of her heart condition, so they fell by the wayside for the majority of my pregnancy.
After Regan was born and the nurse put Regan in my arms for the first time, I was overwhelmed with love and like the Grinch’s heart on Christmas day, my heart grew three times in size that day. To a certain extent, most newborns look the same. Their small squishy features take a while to work themselves out in their first weeks of life. While in the NICU and for the first couple weeks at home, our focus re-centered around Regan’s health, gaining weight, feeds and medicine while we settled into a routine. But in the past couple weeks, her features have started to come alive and her facial expressions are more distinct than ever.
More people than I can count have told me how much she looks like her daddy Mitch. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous, but every time someone tells me it makes my heart swell three times more than when she was born. I’m ALWAYS proud of her, but hearing that other people can see her resemblance of Mitch tugs at my heartstrings in such a different and special way.
I have a feeling that as Regan grows, my (ignorant) fears about her having Down syndrome will be washed away like this one has been. Even in her short 2.5 months, she’s been full of surprises and I can’t wait to see what else she has in store for us.
