By Nadine Briggs and Donna Shea
On April 30th of this year, I (Nadine) wrote a blog (http://www.howtomakeandkeepfriends.com/kids-come-bonus-features/) about some recent struggles that my daughter was having recently. She is 20 and has Down syndrome. 
She has a “bonus feature” that popped up and grew into a potentially life-altering challenge. In order to help her, we worried about it, sought out professionals and connected with experts to do everything we could to give her the best chance to overcome this latest challenge. We put in a lot of effort but it was nothing compared to the hard work she has had to do. My daughter is gritty. She learns about grit at the school she attends but she learned about what it meant to persevere much earlier than that. As her mom, I knew that her life would be obviously harder. She has an extra chromosome that makes certain things in life much more difficult. I knew that I would need to teach her to not give up. Not ever. She learned the lesson well and is now one of the grittiest people you will ever meet. When there are wellness challenges at her school, not only is she the captain of her team but she wins every single time. When she attends a public BBQ, she finds her way into volleyball games, Frisbee, and other group sports with people she has never met. She is competitive almost to a fault but I embrace that part of her and am grateful that it exists. The times during childhood when we would play trains, I would make that train fall back down the hill over and over and over again and tell her that the train must not give up. It might be sweaty, tired, hungry, angry and discouraged but it will, against all odds, get up that hill. It must be gritty. She was 3 years old at the time.
Fast forward to today. My daughter knows that this latest challenge has the potential to hinder her future. She knows that her hopes and dreams were dependent on her being able to overcome this. I am not being dramatic. As I mentioned in the first blog about this challenge, I will not reveal the details to protect her privacy but it is an enormous obstacle. Well my girl is doing it. She is being her grittiest self and is kicking this thing to the curb. It has been hard. She has struggled. She has been sweaty, tired, hungry, angry and discouraged but she has plowed through. She is not done yet but she is close. Every victory is celebrated and the future is beginning to get its shine back. She is working hard and is undeterred. Gritty is most definitely good.
