Video transcript
Karen (mother of 3 children, including daughter with Down Syndrome): Working on your relationship when you’ve got any children, but particularly a child that’s got special needs, is so really … it’s crucial and it’s probably more important than anything else you do.
But it takes a long time. Well, it took me a long time to realise that and to get to that. And it was only when our relationship was in real bad, in dire straits, that we were, ‘Oh dear, we maybe need to put some work and time and energy into there’.
It’s difficult, I think, when, you know, you’ve come together, you’ve fallen in love and you’ve made a child together and the child’s not OK. So it can it can bring up issues around – ‘Are we meant to be together?’ And, you know, ‘If we hadn’t got together, then maybe we wouldn’t have this happen to us’. You know, ‘If maybe I’d had a baby with someone else or …’
So all these things can start to come up and build up and if there’s no time set aside to remember why you love each other, you put the work in, you can remember why you fell in love. If your relationship needs to end or you decide to end, you’ve still got to communicate for the rest of that child’s life and so you’ve got to work on your relationship, however that relationship’s going to be. Whether it’s still together and in love, or whether it’s separated and just loving and kind.
Rebecca (mother of 2 children, including daughter with Pallister-Killian Syndrome): For families who are at that process of, you know, confronting diagnosis, the biggest thing that made a difference for me was my mindset. I made a decision that either I could be bitter and upset about the fact that this happened to my child, for the rest of my life or her life, or I could work at deciding – ‘Well, I’m going to be happy anyway. I’m going to find a way’. And I decided that that’s what I would do. So I started off small. I decided at the end of every day, I would tell Tim something good about my day, and it just worked because I was focusing on all those positive things all the time.