Not polished enough.
Not expensive enough.
Not impressive enough.
I worried people would look at my brother with Down syndrome and decide whatever he’d made belonged in a different category from everyone else’s work.
I never once considered how insulting that was.
Not because people never judge him.
They do.
Not because everything comes just as easily to him.
It doesn’t.
But because I’d started doing the exact thing I hated when other people did it to him.
I was deciding his limits for him.
Danny didn’t need me to lower the stage.
He needed someone to adjust the microphone.
There’s a difference.
At prom, he stood in front of four hundred people with fogged-up glasses and a box he’d spent five months building.
Special needs support
His cuts weren’t all straight.
The sparrow looked questionable.
One hinge squeaked every time he opened it.
None of that mattered.
Because when Danny looked at me and said, “You can go. But come back,” there wasn’t a single person left in that room comparing him to the kid from Parsons.
Including me.
