Every Superhero has an Origin Story.

I’d like to take you on a journey. It started on May 20th, 2017. On that day I married the angel of my life and together we took the first step in building our family. We spent the next year planning, thinking and dreaming of all the things our little family would become. You can only imagine how many times we spoke about it; our little vision for the world we were going to make.

One of the most amazing days in my life came soon there after. I came home to my wife and she broke the news about being pregnant. You can only imagine how our life soared. Suddenly all of those dreams, plans and spots of our imagination were going to become a reality. Flash forward to the early hours of December 1st. Conner James Norris was born and dreams were truly a reality.

That is when the strangest thing happened. A doctor came in to our life and told us the news; Conner had some health issues. During his routine twenty four hour testing, they had discovered that there was a hole in his heart. And. They were doing some testing to confirm what markers were telling them; that Conner had Trisomy21.

Several doctors and days came and went, before we were given the results. They delivered the news and told us that they understood we were in mourning. The irony of that statement is that we weren’t. Neither of us had even thought in those terms as we grappled with the idea that he may have Down’s Syndrome.

Our son was alive. Struggling with some health issues, but very much alive. The idea of mourning had never even occurred to us, until we were told that the Doctor understood we should. Just as quickly as the thought occurred to us and we wiped away our tears, we knew something profound. They were wrong.

Mourning is an act of expressing sorrow. Most commonly it’s associated with death. The Doctor meant no offense. He was trying to empathize with the ‘death’ of our hopes and dreams for this little young man named Conner. When the reality is that we saw Conner as a blessing. He was our son, is our son. The prognosis only made him more special.

We haven’t shared this story with everyone, but it wasn’t a secret. The people who needed to know, knew and those who didn’t were left to simply meet Conner James. The idea we had was that we wanted everyone to meet or see him for the young, precious babe that he is. We wanted everyone to see him, to know him, without any pre-conceived notions of what they might believe was a diagnosis that brings ‘Mourning’ in to the discussion.

Conner was a blessing then. He’s a blessing now. Nothing has changed or died with those same dreams we had, except for the path we’ll take to get there.

Nothing has changed for you either. So don’t lose those notions you had. Celebrate the opportunity he has to help you and others understand that there’s nothing to mourn here.

Every superhero has a beginning and this is Conner’s.