The Pursuit of Perfection

Dearest Bug,

 Pretty much my entire life I have struggled with my own self image. If I'm honest with myself (and you!) here, I have to say that it's an issue that I still battle at times, even now. I look in the mirror and see every little imperfection, every blemish, every ounce of cellulite, instead of seeing the good things about myself. I try to convince myself most days that how I look on the outside doesn't really matter anyway. It's what is inside that counts most. And even I have to admit, most of the time I am pretty darn proud of what's on the inside.

But ours is a culture that typically values what is visible to the naked eye more than what we have to dig deeper to find. Society looks for beauty, thinness, and dare I say it? Perfection. 

This leads me to a big question. If, as the Bible says, we are all made in God's image, then aren't we, even with all of our "flaws" as humans as close to perfection as we can possibly get? 

The hardest thing for me to wrap my head around when I found out that you had Down's Syndrome was the misconception that you would be less than perfect. I guess all of my years on this Earth had reinforced that anything less than what I had envisioned as "normal" wouldn't be acceptable. Not that I didn't love you, even amidst all of my sadness and fear. But I also mourned deeply for that idea of the "perfect" baby I thought that I was losing.

How amazing to find that I didn't lose that baby at all.

 You. are. pure. perfection.

Every single thing about you is exactly as it should be. Exactly how you were created to be by the greatest mastermind ever, our awesome God. 

He put together the pieces of you. He gave you your big blue eyes, your soft pink skin, your amazing smile, your crooked pinkies, and your tiny feet, made just perfect for sandals. He gave you your awesome personality, full of pride, joy, love, and strength with a liberal dose of pure sunshine thrown in for good measure. He took all of the best parts of Daddy, me, your great-great grannies and tons of other ancestors and knit you together into one absolutely bright and beautiful package. He even created your (formerly) tiny broken heart. And as hard as it was for me to understand the reasoning, He KNEW that you would be tough enough to withstand whatever you had to go through for that heart to be whole again and that you had the determination to come out of it all stronger than ever.

It will never matter to us whether you are long and lean, or short and stubby, or somewhere in between. It won't matter whether your hair is straight as a board or curly. It won't matter whether you hit every developmental milestone exactly when you are supposed to or if you lag behind. It doesn't make a bit of difference if you learn fast or slow. Regardless of what the future holds, you are you. Beautiful. Perfect. Loved beyond measure.

We may never be the world's idea of perfect on the outside, but I gotta say that we're pretty darn close to it on the inside.

So I say, let's go ahead and ditch this endless pursuit of this elusive thing we call perfection. We have skipped right past it into the best part of all. Happiness. :)

All of my love,

Mama