08/10/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HN4EuCNSM/?mibextid=wwXIfr
What if it is no accident or coincidence that you have been given the child you have?
I know I wasn’t quite the baby you imagined.
My arrival may have taken you into a world you never expected, cleft teams, feeding equipment, surgeries, waiting rooms, decisions and language you never thought you would need to understand.
And perhaps, for a while, you wondered how you were going to do all of this.
But what if I came to show you something?
What if I came to loosen your grip on everything you thought life was supposed to look like?
What if I came to ask you to question what you had been taught about beauty, perfection, difference and what makes a human being whole?
What if my face was never the problem?
What if some of the beliefs surrounding it were?
Children like me can be cycle breakers.
We can arrive into families and invite something different.
You can repeat what the world has taught you about difference.. or you can question it.
You can spend my childhood teaching me that my face is something to overcome, or you can teach me, from the beginning, that I was never less than anything simply because I arrived differently.
And while you are shaping me, I will be shaping you too.
I may call you towards courage you didn’t know you had. Towards deeper compassion. Towards a different relationship with uncertainty.
I may even ask you to heal parts of yourself that existed long before I arrived.
Because parenting was never simply about what you would teach me.
It was always going to be about what we would awaken in one another.
So perhaps instead of only asking,
“Why did this happen to my baby?”
We might sometimes dare to ask,
“What might this child be here to show me?”
What if your family is exactly the family this incredible soul has chosen?
What then?
Maybe this isn’t the parenting experience you imagined. But perhaps it becomes something far more expansive.
And maybe one day you realise that while you were wondering how you were going to guide your child through having a cleft…they were quietly changing the way you saw the world. 🤍
What then? ❤️
