The Pursuit of Perfection

In the eyes of the world, Miks, you were not perfect. You held none of the glitz and glamour that so many spend their entire lives trying to attain. You did not live a "full life" (read: until you were old and grey). You had nothing fancy to offer. You were, some people would say, a simpleton. Just nothing special at all.

Another T18 mommy and friend, had some awful comments posted on her videos of her sweet boy, who's over 2 years old. Really, in a nutshell, they questioned the value of his life, and questioned the parents love for him, because, in their words, the parents were being cruel to this little boy.

And it's made me think: who determines what the value of a life is? The doctors? The parents? Your friends? The teachers? Is the value of your life determined by fame? Or fortune? Perhaps by influence or power? Is it knowledge that holds weight to value, or is it achievement and recognition?

Knowing what I know now...would I change it? Would I go back, and take it all back? Would I? Having gone through what I went through, and having seen you go through what you went through, would I go back and change it because your life wasn't worth it? Or was it?

You see, the question that I keep wondering to ask is not whether your life was worth LIVING, but rather, would your life have been worth TAKING?

When people talk now about terminating T18 babies, I don't look at that through the lens of doctor, or scholar, but rather, well, I look at it as if someone would be asking me if I'd be happy that they took the life of my daughter. Please understand that I don't mean it as a criticism or judgement. It's just that, well, Miks, for everything that you were not, you WERE still my child. You had personality, and spunk, and character. You were sure of what you wanted and didn't want. You were a person. Just in a different to mostly everyone else.

But so what?

You see, in our pursuit of perfection, we're so busy qualifying everyone around us through our own lenses of approval, that I think we're missing out on the potential of the beauty below what we're seeing. If we instead loved one another, as God has commanded us to do, and as Jesus did, we would only see the wonder in one another, rather than constantly de-valuing, qualifying, and segmenting each other.

And I guess that's the point. When it came down to it, I was well aware of everything you were not. I could see your "imperfections". Often they hit me squarely in the face as we battled with things other parents have not had to. But, at the end of it all, we saw YOU. Petite, beautiful, angelic YOU. And you were perfect. Not by worldly standards, but by YOU standards. We couldn't qualify you. And you had no desire to be qualified. You just wanted to be loved. And since we couldn't give you anything else, that's exactly what we gave you... in abundance! I don't know that any other child has been kisses that much in 491 days!!

Yes, I think I will wear Mikayla lenses from now on. They say that every life has value, regardless of societies expectations. And that the place to start with is always with love.