TABBY’S STORY

I want to bring up a story about our daughter, Tabby. So she knows, she BELIEVES, that she is an artist. She BELIEVES she is the best looking girl and the smartest woman on the face of this Earth. She BELIEVES that her personality can bring life to every room, and that her pat on the shoulder can bring calm to every person who’s in distress.

Wouldn’t it be great to have that kind of confidence? She’s 28 years old, and Tabby has Down Syndrome. So that means that she learns slower and some things she’s not ever going to be able to truly learn all the way like we understand them.

So when she was five years old, and she was going into kindergarten, we had her IQ assessment. And that was really fun and awful and I wasn’t a Christian, so I wasn’t really nice. And so I pretty much told them that they assessed her wrong. But it was a clinical assessment and we went with the diagnosis of her IQ scoring, which was clinically, severely mentally retarded. She wasn’t even at 45, which is where the charting starts.

Part of Tabatha’s learning in school was that they just said, “We’ll just start with the basics, and we’ll see what she can catch on to.” Because they really didn’t know where her understanding was. So we developed basic sight words that she took everywhere. We would flash the card and she actually would read the word and we helped her with her articulation. We did this for years, pretty soon she was reading at a first grade level. And I’m thinking, “This is really good, we’re going to use sentence strips.” So we developed laminated sentence strips, and we carried them everywhere we went and she had to verbalize to us what she wanted. And through that she learned to communicate with us.

So now she’s going into high school, and I thought “We’re gonna get more speech minutes. So let’s take her back in and let’s have her assessed again.” And again, it landed our child at under 45. She was still considered, by the scoring, severely mentally retarded. And so now as a Christian, I got ticked off in a nicer way. And I said, “Well, how is this going to help us? I’m thinking we can get more speech minutes in.” And the psychiatrist said, “I’m so sorry. You know, this is probably not going to help you.” And I said, “Well, I guess we’ll just continue sentence strips.” So I explained to her what we had done throughout the years. And she said, “No, no, no, let me help you understand something, Tabatha does not understand written language. What she sees on a piece of paper are squiggle lines, and the squiggle lines don’t really mean anything to her.” And again, I tried to hold back the floodgate of mommy bear claws because she was a really great lady. So I said, “No, she understands what she is reading.”

So she brought out a little piece of paper and she brought out a book and she assessed her in a different way. And through that testing, she understood that Tabatha understood written language. She was reading basic sentences and she was able to match pictures that went with those sentences. So I remember that day like it was yesterday. She took her glasses off and she put them on the the desk and she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it. Because I would have bet my career that this child would never be able to understand written language.” So there’s no kudos to us and all that she had a great team around her. But Tabatha didn’t know that she couldn’t do these things.

A NEW LANGUAGE
Just like my daughter has so much confidence being herself, we have to understand that when we are in Christ, we should know what CHRIST ESTEEM is. That means that He tells us what we can and cannot do. He tells us our worth. And we believe Him.

Back to Romans 12:2, it says, Don’t copy the behaviors and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. He does the transforming. He does the changing. We just have to be willing. Are we willing to step into what we need to do?

I am quite sure that if you ask my daughter, “Do you want to do flashcards for the first part of your whole life?”She probably would have said, “It’s a whole lot better to go outside and play to jump on the trampoline.” But she sat and she went over and over just the basic things so that she could learn a language, learn how to express herself, and learn how to understand people.

When someone comes out of a lifetime of drugs and alcohol and into the Finding the Family, they are learning a new language. They are literally saying I don’t know how to think without thinking bad, do without doing something bad. I don’t know how to trust God, because I’ve never done it before. And it’s just a new language.