{"id":220383,"date":"2020-03-21T11:19:29","date_gmt":"2020-03-21T16:19:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=220383"},"modified":"2020-03-20T16:55:54","modified_gmt":"2020-03-20T21:55:54","slug":"mom-10-year-old-down-syndrome-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/mom-10-year-old-down-syndrome-art\/","title":{"rendered":"AMAZING: Mom of 10-year-old with Down syndrome celebrates by turning her son into art"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

On her son’s 10th birthday last month, Erin Witkowski recalled the day that changed her life forever. At 21 weeks pregnant, she found out her son had Down syndrome, and her doctor encouraged her to have an abortion<\/a>. She refused, and her son, Grady, is now 10 years old. And to celebrate that amazing milestone, she did a beautiful photo shoot, inspired by that conversation with her doctor, and the Japanese art of Kintsugi.<\/p>\n

“I remember the large wooden desk the Dr. sat at and the Stained Glass that towered behind him,” Witkowski wrote in an emotional post on Facebook<\/a>. “Grady’s tiny feet where kicking my belly as my husband grabbed my hand so we could sit down. His first words after we sat down … ‘I’m sorry your son has Down syndrome, you have two weeks to make a decision.'” Witkowski said that the only decision they made was to never see that doctor again, but his words stayed with her. Yet his callous outlook towards her son couldn’t have been more different than the love she felt for her child.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Down Syndrome Diagnosis Network connects families with resources and offers hope<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

“I have relived those words and that moment over and over again in my mind, they burned deep into my motherly soul,” she wrote. “It was THAT very moment my son was named a ‘decision’ and ‘broken’ to the world was also the same day we named him a gift from God.”<\/p>\n

For Grady’s 10th birthday, Witkowski, a photographer, did a photo shoot with him before a stained glass window, inspired by that heartbreaking conversation so many years ago. And every area that is typically identified as a marker for Down syndrome was filled in with gold, inspired by Kintsugi. This Japanese art fills broken objects with gold, as a way of treating breakage and repair as part of the history and beauty of an object, as opposed to something to be concealed or thrown away. And the gold marks in what was previously deemed as broken turns the flawed or imperfect into something even more beautiful.<\/p>\n