Scoot Over and Make Some Room by Heather Avis

Author:Heather Avis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2019-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

DANCE!

We sat on an old dark leather couch in one of the small, square rooms in the office of our adoption agency. We were there to meet with my future daughter’s birth parents. My palms were sweaty, and I had the feeling that fire ants were marching through my stomach as they told us a little more about themselves.

“I love to dance,” said Vickie, our daughter’s birth mother, with a smile. “In fact, I danced and listened to music throughout my whole pregnancy.” The expression on her face shifted from a smile to a far-off look.

My eyes welled with tears as I envisioned this woman dancing in her kitchen while she cooked, overflowing with the joy of a baby growing in her womb. And then, later, I imagined her doing a slow kind of dance in her living room when the sorrow she felt from a Down syndrome diagnosis led her to create an adoption plan for her baby girl.

I learned a lot about Vickie that day. But the one thing I remember most was the look of pure delight on her face when she shared her love of music and dance. And that’s what I was thinking about eight years later when Macyn conquered her first dance recital—a dance recital that changed my life.

Macyn started dancing before she started walking. I have a video of her at eighteen months old scooting around on her tush, a cannula in her nose pumping oxygen to her sick little lungs. And then, as the sound of music makes its way to her ears, she stops dead in her tracks and starts swaying side to side and back and forth. My girl has always loved to dance.

When she was four, we enrolled her in ballet, but it was too slow for my, shall we say, aggressive dancer. I don’t recall exactly when it was that Macyn first heard about hip-hop, but I can tell you this: as soon as she did, she was hooked.

I also don’t recall why we didn’t get her into a hip-hop class until she was eight years old. As it goes with most extracurricular activities and a child with Down syndrome, the first does not usually make space for the second. During those first eight years as Macyn’s parents, we quickly discovered that most people think it’s best to have a separate place for people with different abilities. A “special” class, if you will. But I knew we weren’t going to put Macyn in a special dance class. Our daughter with Down syndrome does not live in some special world, separate from everything and everyone, so she was not going to dance in a separate place.

The challenge for Macy is she lacks many of the skills her eight-year-old dancing peers possess. Her gross motor skills and working memory make it difficult for her to execute dance moves with precision and to remember routines. And a hip-hop class wouldn’t be the kind of freestyle dancing Macyn did at home—or at the store, or all the restaurants, or on the sidewalk when a car blasting music passed by.

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