What does it take? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about lately. What do I need to do to raise Hope well? What kind of person do I need to be? How do I make sure she is achieving all she needs to? What does it take? In all that pondering, I realised there is one thing that makes everything work, that makes everything achievable. Belief. It’s bigger than just believing in Hope. It’s first, in believing in myself.

How can I expect myself to believe in Hope, and believe that she is capable if I first don’t believe in myself? I need to believe that I am capable as a mum to Hope and that I can be everything that she needs to be. To believe in myself means that I am confident in what I can achieve. When I believe in myself I take action and I push for improvement in myself and all that is around me. Belief is like the “go” button. Without it, we don’t get started, and if we don’t get started, we remain in the same place, never growing and never improving. When I hit the go button, I work harder for myself and for my family.

Accept Where You Are

I think the first thing you need to do, and possibly it’s one of the hardest things, is to accept where you are. In times when things are great and you don’t feel like you have any worries, then this is an easy thing to do. But, when times are tough, and you feel like things are weighing you down. Maybe you feel like there’s a lot going on around you and you are losing control over what’s going on in your life. These are the times that it becomes hard to accept. What we need to realise that it’s just a season and accepting where you are will help you to grow through the experience and come out the other side. In accepting where you are, you accept yourself. Accepting yourself is a step in the right direction to believing in yourself.

Accepting where I was was quite a big thing for me in dealing with the everything when we were told there was a high chance that our little girl would have Down syndrome. I had to accept it, and honestly, it took me a while. I kept telling myself that she would be completely fine, that there is a small chance that tests could show a false positive. And even though that chance was 1%, I would try to convince myself that I would be that 1% so I didn’t have to accept what was in front of me. Imagine if I never did accept it, if I didn’t accept where I was, or what was going on in my life. Well, I don’t think Hope would be where she is now. I had to accept where I was, to believe I was capable of getting through it, and to believe in myself. That small piece, the acceptance, was a huge step in getting us to where we are today.

Trust Yourself

When it comes to trust, we don’t often think about our self-trust. We think about others and how we can trust or distrust them, but we forget that we can also have trust or distrust for ourselves. Problems can arise when we don’t trust ourselves, we can become dishonest with ourselves, we start to doubt ourselves and we stop seeing what we are capable of. Lack of trust in ourselves can come from something quite small like telling ourselves we’re going to eat healthy and then not doing it. Doing this multiple times starts causing us to not trust what we say we are going to do. If we don’t trust what we say we are going to do, we’re unlikely to put in the effort to make it happen, we’re not going to believe in ourselves enough to even try.

For many years, I struggled with some self-trust issues. I didn’t trust myself enough to even be me, and in the process I lost myself. I lost sight of the person I was supposed to be. It took time and I thought I had gotten through that, but I still struggled and found at times that I just wanted to hide away on my own because that way I couldn’t hurt anyone or let anyone down. It was an extremely lonely place to be, and it really wasn’t healthy and in the end I was hurting myself more than I would have hurt others. The issue was all in my self trust. I had to learn to trust myself to get up and out of my lonely place. I had to trust in myself in order to believe that I was actually a good friend and believe that people did want me around. If I’m honest, it’s still an ongoing battle. Some days it’s easier than others. But every day I get up and I make a choice to trust myself… To trust that I am a good parent. To trust that I am doing all I can to ensure my kids are looked after. To trust that I am doing everything possible to make sure that Hope is feeling loved. It’s a choice I will continue to make every day. The minute I stop trusting myself, is the minute things will begin to slip out of my grasp. It’s when the belief in myself will go. The distrust will come straight back in and I will give up, and want to go back into a place of hiding. Self-trust is huge when it comes to believing in yourself.

Be Optimistic

Negativity is not helpful. When you want to believe in yourself and believe in others, you need to replace your negative thoughts with positive. You need to believe things are possible regardless of what is going on and regardless of what anyone says (including yourself). You may not realise just how much your negativity affects your life, but when you choose to look at the positive, when you choose to be optimistic, things start looking up. You begin to believe more is possible and you begin to believe more in yourself. Being thankful for the things we have can change our outlook on life.

Positivity and optimism come quite easy for me. I am good at finding the positive in what seems like a less than ideal situation but sometimes it takes time to get there. Once again, I want to talk about Hope’s diagnosis. This was a time where optimism wasn’t so easy for me. I did find myself finding a lot of negatives and had difficulty in trying to find the positive. But when I did, it made a huge difference to how I saw things. I realised that while having a child with Down syndrome was not what we expected, and it potentially meant things wouldn’t be quite so easy, I was thankful that my child was healthy. I was thankful that she had a good chance of survival. If I had to place our situation on a line from worst possible news to best news, it was much closer to the good news side than the bad news side. I started to believe in myself, that I was capable of getting through this time, and as I began to grow in my confidence, as I began to believe in myself, I could see Ben growing in his confidence too.

Don’t Look Back, Say Goodbye To Fear

When I say don’t look back, I’m not saying completely forget the past. The past is what has brought us to where we are. It’s what’s taught us and helped create the person we are today. What we don’t want to do though, is look back and get stuck in the past or stuck in our failures. Don’t get stuck thinking about the things you couldn’t or didn’t do. When we do we sometimes find we develop a fear of failure and this fear will then hold us back from believing in ourselves. We need to remember that failure is not actually the end. Failure is growth and is actually a step towards success. We learn and we move on, we try again and eventually we succeed. When we start to shut down our fears, we stop looking back, we move forward and begin to believe all that is possible.

Getting over my fear of failure and not looking back has played a huge part in me believing in what I’m doing. Right now, as I sit and write this blog (and edit it over and over to try and make it right), I’m fighting that fear of failure. I write and in my mind I am questioning how people will respond. With each blog I write, I have a hope that we reach someone and help open their hearts a little more to those with Down syndrome. So every time I write, I question myself.. What if nobody reads this? What if nobody likes it? What if I don’t reach anybody with any of these blogs? Have I failed? And every time I finish writing my blog, I hover over the Publish button, and I hit it. “TAKE THAT FEAR!” There’s been weeks where very few have read the blogs, and those weeks, I’ve thought, perhaps I failed. But I come back and I write again because… if I Iet my fear of failure win, if I stop writing, I’m definitely not going to make a difference. I have learnt to to believe in myself in ways that I haven’t before simply by not letting each week define the next, and by not letting my fear of failure take over.

Let me go back to my initial question… What does it take? What does it take to raise Hope? I said it before and I’ll say it again, I need to believe in myself. It’s not something that comes easily. It can be an ongoing battle, but believing in myself allows me to believe in Hope and believing in Hope is what will help her succeed.