Have you ever told yourself no? Have you ever let an opportunity slip by because you doubted your ability to succeed or you didn’t think you would like it? I lived most of my life telling myself no 10 times for every one time I told myself yes. I became a master dam builder, able to build a dam in an instant to stop the flow of opportunity. It became so comfortable that I started offering and building dams for other people in my life.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“No, you can’t sign up for alpine horn lessons.”

“No, you can’t have a dog because I know you. You’ll play with it, but I’ll be the one who has to pick up the poop.”

I told myself I could never find joy in writing about special needs because I wasn’t interested in sharing my daily parenting trials with strangers, like most of the other special needs bloggers were doing. Well, here I am joyfully writing because I told myself yes and I found a different approach that people seem to like. And I am learning to say yes to myself more and more, tearing down some of the dams I had built to meet what I interpreted as other peoples’ expectations of me.

This is top of mind for me because of this short video. I shared it recently on my Special Ops Facebook page to highlight my earlier post about the Exceptional Needs Network Camp that my son, Christian, attends.

More importantly, I never thought what happened in the video was possible. (Go ahead, watch the video. I’ll wait.)

To you it might just be a 15-year-old boy with Down syndrome messing around on a piano, hamming for the crowd. To me it was a miracle (the playing; I already knew about the hamming). We don’t have a piano in the house, we rarely listen to jazz, and the handful of times I’ve seen C around a piano he was only interested in making the most noise possible and banging the keyboard cover up and down, not exactly how I envisioned Beethoven starting out. So when C’s camp counselor told me he was going to play the piano during the closing talent show, I rolled my eyes, climbed up on top of the dam I had subconsciously built years earlier, and braced for the noise.

I positioned myself next to the piano so I could get some video as a record of his camp experience.  When he began to play, I looked at his counselor, who gave me the “I know, right?” look, and then I started simultaneously laughing and crying (amazingly keeping the phone steady enough to record the whole performance).

His beautiful music blew a big hole in my dam, knocking me off into the reservoir of possibility that had built up behind it and was now gushing over the top. I had let his disability blind me to his ability, and when he finally got the opportunity he shocked me with his awesomeness.

The real beauty, for me, is how natural it was. No lessons, no scales, no practicing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” over and over. It just flowed out of him. His possibilities are damless.