{"id":1556,"date":"2026-05-18T01:57:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T01:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/?p=1556"},"modified":"2026-05-18T01:57:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T01:57:59","slug":"i-got-pregnant-by-a-married-man-and-my-baby-was-born-with-down-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/?p=1556","title":{"rendered":"I Got Pregnant by a Married Man, and My Baby Was Born With Down Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I Got Pregnant by a Married Man and My Baby Was Born With Down Syndrome. With Nothing Left to Lose, I Sent His Wife a Message at 9:47 p.m. on a Sunday \u2014 and What She Wrote Back the Next Morning Destroyed Every Assumption I Had About Forgiveness.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had spent six weeks preparing for her to come after me \u2014 and she had every right to. I was the other woman. I had made choices I cannot defend. I had a daughter whose existence was the living proof of everything I had done wrong. When I finally hit send on that message, I was braced for the worst response a woman could give another woman. What arrived at 6:23 the next morning was something I did not have a category for. I still don’t.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 1: The Woman I Was Before<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are things about yourself that you do not know until a specific set of circumstances strips away every comfortable story you have been telling and leaves you with nothing but the unvarnished truth of who you actually are and what you are actually capable of. I did not know I was capable of the choices I made in the year I turned thirty-one. I did not know I was capable of the consequences either. And I did not know \u2014 could not have imagined, would not have believed if someone had told me \u2014 that the most profound act of grace I would ever receive in my life would come from the one woman on earth who had every right to hate me completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My name is Simone Archer. I am thirty-four years old, a former marketing coordinator living in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I am writing this from the apartment I share with my daughter, Nora, who is two and a half years old and who is, as I write this, asleep in the room down the hall with her stuffed elephant and her sound machine and the specific, absolute peace of a child who has no idea that her existence arrived wrapped in the most complicated circumstances of her mother’s life. I am writing this because I have been carrying it for two and a half years and because the carrying has become something I need to put down \u2014 not to excuse what I did, not to ask for absolution I have not earned, but because the truth of what happened and what came after is a truth that I believe other people need to hear, and because silence, in my experience, does not heal anything. It only preserves the wound in the dark where it cannot be examined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I need to say the hard thing first, before anything else, because the story does not make sense without it and because I owe it to everyone involved to say it plainly: I had a relationship with a man I knew was married. I knew from the beginning. I told myself the things that people tell themselves in those situations \u2014 that his marriage was already over, that he was unhappy, that what we had was different, that the rules that applied to other situations did not apply to ours because ours was special. I told myself those things with the specific, practiced conviction of a woman who wants very badly to believe them and who has decided that wanting to believe something is close enough to it being true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His name was Marcus Webb. He was thirty-eight, a regional sales director for a medical device company headquartered in the South Park area of Charlotte, and he was \u2014 I want to say this honestly, without the retroactive vilification that would make the story simpler but less true \u2014 a man who was genuinely charming and genuinely attentive and genuinely skilled at making a woman feel like the most important person in the room. He had a quality that I have since come to recognize as a specific kind of danger: the ability to be completely present with you in a way that feels like devotion but is actually just a very refined form of compartmentalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met at a marketing conference in Raleigh in the spring of the year I turned thirty-one. He was a speaker on one of the afternoon panels. I was attending on behalf of the firm where I worked. We had drinks at the hotel bar afterward with a group of conference attendees, and by the end of the evening he had my number and I had the specific, warm, slightly reckless feeling of a woman who has met someone who sees her and who is not thinking clearly about what that seeing is going to cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He told me about his wife on the third date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the truth, and I am not going to dress it up or explain it away. He told me, and I stayed, and the reasons I stayed are the reasons that people stay in situations they know are wrong \u2014 a combination of wanting, and loneliness, and the specific, seductive lie that love, when it feels real enough, supersedes the obligations it is violating. I was lonely in the specific, invisible way of a woman in her early thirties who has built a competent, organized life and who has everything in order except the thing she most wants, and Marcus Webb arrived in that loneliness like a light in a window, and I walked toward the light without asking enough questions about what was on the other side of the glass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relationship lasted eleven months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I found out I was pregnant in February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 2: The Pregnancy and the Silence
I took the test on a Tuesday morning in my bathroom in the apartment on Morehead Street, and I sat on the edge of the bathtub for a long time afterward, holding the test in both hands, looking at the two lines with the specific, suspended disbelief of a person who has just received information that is going to reorganize everything and who is not yet ready for the reorganization to begin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I called Marcus that afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The call lasted twenty-two minutes, and I remember the specific, terrible arc of it \u2014 the initial silence, the careful questions about certainty and timing, the gentle but unmistakable introduction of the word “options,” the specific, practiced compassion of a man who has thought about this possibility and who has a position on it and who is delivering the position with the specific, managed warmth of someone who wants to be kind while being clear. He said he cared about me. He said this was complicated. He said he needed time to think. He said the word “options” twice more before the call ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not call him back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had thought, in the days before I called him, that his response would determine what I decided. I had told myself that if he was supportive, if he showed up, if he demonstrated the specific, concrete willingness to be present in the way that the situation required, I would figure out the rest. And if he didn’t \u2014 if the call went the way the call went \u2014 then I would have my answer about what kind of man he was and what kind of future the three of us could realistically have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The call went the way the call went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had my answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided to keep the baby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to be clear that this was my decision, made for my own reasons, and that I am not presenting it as the only right decision or the decision that everyone in my situation should make. I am presenting it as the decision I made, with the specific, private certainty of a woman who looked at the situation she was in and determined that the one thing she was not willing to do was add another loss to the ones she had already accumulated. I was thirty-one years old and I was alone and I was pregnant by a married man who had just told me, in the careful language of a man who does not want to say the hard thing directly, that he was not going to be there. And I decided that I was going to be there \u2014 for myself and for the child \u2014 and that the rest of it I would figure out as it came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus sent two texts in the weeks that followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not respond to either of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pregnancy was, in the medical sense, unremarkable for the first twenty weeks. I had moved to a smaller apartment in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood of Charlotte, found an OB at Atrium Health, and begun the specific, solitary process of preparing for a child alone \u2014 the prenatal appointments and the registry and the nursery and the careful, methodical accumulation of the things a baby needs, all of it done without the person who was supposed to be doing it beside me. My mother flew in from Greensboro twice. My best friend, a woman named Deja, came to every appointment she could. I was not entirely alone. But I was alone in the specific, central way of a woman whose partner is absent, and the absence had a weight that the presence of other loving people could not entirely offset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At twenty-two weeks, my OB referred me to a maternal-fetal medicine specialist for a detailed anatomy scan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The specialist’s name was Dr. Patricia Nguyen, and she had the specific, warm directness of a clinician who has delivered difficult news many times and who has learned that the most respectful thing she can do is tell the truth clearly and then be present for whatever comes after the telling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She told me that the scan showed markers consistent with Trisomy 21.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Down syndrome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She explained what the markers meant and what the diagnosis would mean for my daughter’s life \u2014 the range of outcomes, the variability of the condition, the specific, individual nature of a diagnosis that looks different in every person who carries it. She gave me information and resources and the name of a genetic counselor and the specific, steady presence of a woman who was not going to tell me how to feel about what she had just told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I drove home from that appointment alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat in the parking lot of my apartment complex for forty-five minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I went inside and I called my mother and I told her, and she cried, and then she said: “Tell me what you need and I will be there.” I told her I needed a few days to sit with it. She said she would be on the first flight whenever I was ready. I thanked her. I hung up. I sat in my kitchen in the specific, enormous quiet of a woman who has just been handed a truth that is going to require more of her than she currently knows how to give, and I made the decision \u2014 not dramatically, not with a speech, but quietly and completely \u2014 that I was going to be exactly what my daughter needed, whatever that turned out to mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not contact Marcus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told myself it was because his response to the pregnancy had already told me everything I needed to know about what his response to this would be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was partly true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other part \u2014 the part I was not ready to examine \u2014 was that telling Marcus meant confronting the full reality of what I had done, and I was not yet ready for that confrontation. I was managing one enormous thing at a time, and the enormous thing in front of me was my daughter, and I put everything I had into preparing for her arrival and told myself the rest could wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It waited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until Nora was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 3: Nora
Nora Grace Archer was born on a Thursday morning in October at Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, seven pounds and four ounces, with a full head of dark hair and the specific, unmistakable features of a baby with Down syndrome and the specific, unmistakable quality of a person who has arrived in the world with something to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She cried immediately and loudly and with the specific, indignant energy of a baby who has opinions about the transition she has just been required to make, and the sound of her \u2014 the specific, living, present, undeniable sound of my daughter announcing herself to the world \u2014 was the most clarifying thing I had ever heard. Every complicated thing fell away in that moment. Every question about what I had done and who I had done it with and what it meant and what came next \u2014 all of it receded, and what remained was the specific, absolute simplicity of a mother hearing her child for the first time and understanding, without ambiguity, that this is the person she would do anything for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My mother was in the room. Deja was in the waiting area. The nurses were kind and the doctor was steady and the morning was October-bright through the hospital window, and my daughter was here, and she was real, and she was mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The days in the hospital were full of the specific, practical information of a new diagnosis \u2014 the pediatric cardiologist who came to check Nora’s heart, the early intervention coordinator who left pamphlets about therapy services, the neonatologist who explained what to watch for and what to expect in the first weeks. I absorbed all of it with the specific, focused attention of a woman who has decided that information is the tool she has and that she is going to use it completely. I asked every question I could think of. I took notes. I called the early intervention coordinator before I left the hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was doing everything right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And underneath everything I was doing right, in the specific, sealed-off place where I had been storing the things I was not ready to examine, was the question I had been avoiding since February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus Webb had a daughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He did not know she existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And his wife \u2014 the woman whose name I knew from the research I had done eleven months earlier with the specific, guilty thoroughness of a woman who wants to know the full dimensions of what she is involved in \u2014 his wife did not know either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her name was Claire Webb. She was thirty-six, a physical therapist with a practice in the Ballantyne area of Charlotte. From what I had been able to find \u2014 and I want to be honest that I had looked, that I had spent time on her social media and her professional profile with the specific, uncomfortable mixture of guilt and curiosity that defines the relationship between a woman and the wife of the man she is involved with \u2014 she appeared to be a person of considerable warmth and competence. She had a life that looked full and real. She had a husband who was, I now understood with the clarity that only distance provides, conducting a version of himself with her that was as carefully managed as the version he had conducted with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about Claire Webb every day for the first six weeks of Nora’s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about what she deserved to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about what telling her would cost me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about Nora, who would grow up without a father unless I did something about it, and about what that absence would mean for her as she got older and began to understand the shape of her family and the space where a father was supposed to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about what I would want, if our positions were reversed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a Sunday evening in December, when Nora was six weeks old and asleep in her bassinet and the apartment was quiet and I had run out of reasons to wait any longer, I opened Instagram and I found Claire Webb’s profile and I sent her a message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My hands shook the entire time I was typing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 4: The Message and the Answer
I wrote the message seven times before I sent it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first three versions were too long \u2014 elaborate, over-explained, full of the specific, defensive architecture of a woman who is trying to control how she is perceived while delivering information that will be received badly regardless of how it is packaged. The fourth version was too short and felt cold. The fifth version was apologetic to the point of being about me rather than about the information I was trying to convey, which was the opposite of what the message needed to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sixth version was close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The seventh version was what I sent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told her my name. I told her I had been in a relationship with her husband from the previous spring through the previous January. I told her I had a daughter who was six weeks old and whose father was Marcus. I told her I was not sending the message to cause pain or to make demands or to insert myself into her life \u2014 I was sending it because she deserved to know the truth about her marriage and because my daughter deserved the possibility of knowing her father, and because I had spent six weeks trying to find a way to not send this message and had run out of ways. I told her I was sorry. Not for Nora \u2014 I was not sorry for Nora \u2014 but for the role I had played in a situation that had hurt her without her knowledge or consent, and for the fact that the hurt was arriving now, in a message from a stranger, rather than from the person who should have told her himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sent it at 9:47 p.m. on a Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I put my phone face-down on the kitchen table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had prepared myself, in the hours of composing and recomposing the message, for the range of responses a woman might send to the person who had just delivered this particular information. I had prepared for anger \u2014 the specific, scorching anger of a woman who has been betrayed and who has a target for it. I had prepared for silence, which would have been its own kind of answer. I had prepared for the possibility that she would forward the message to Marcus and that Marcus would call me, and I had prepared what I would say if he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had not prepared for what she actually sent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her response arrived at 6:23 the following morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was long \u2014 longer than my message, written in the specific, careful way of a person who has spent the night with something and who has decided, after the spending, exactly what she wants to say and how she wants to say it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said she had known about the affair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not from the beginning \u2014 she had found out in March, two months after it ended, from a credit card statement and a hotel charge in Raleigh that Marcus had not adequately explained and that she had investigated with the specific, methodical thoroughness of a woman who already knows the answer and is simply gathering the documentation. She had confronted Marcus. He had admitted it. He had told her it was over. He had not told her about the pregnancy \u2014 she did not know if he knew about it, though she suspected, from the timing and from the specific, guilty quality of his behavior in the months that followed, that he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said she had been living for nine months with the knowledge of the affair and the decision about what to do with it, and that the decision had been the hardest of her life, and that she had not yet made it \u2014 that she and Marcus were in couples counseling and that she was trying to determine whether the marriage was something she wanted to repair or something she needed to leave, and that the process was slow and painful and ongoing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then she said the thing that took the breath out of my body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said: “I don’t blame you the way I should. I know I’m supposed to. I’ve tried. But I’ve spent nine months being angry at Marcus, and somewhere in the middle of that anger I ran out of room to be angry at you too. You didn’t make vows to me. He did. You made a bad choice. He made a worse one, and he made it knowing exactly what it would cost everyone except himself.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said: “Tell me about your daughter.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat at my kitchen table at 6:23 in the morning and I read those words and I felt something break open in me that had been sealed shut since February \u2014 the specific, enormous release of a woman who has been bracing for impact for nine months and who has just been told, by the person whose judgment she feared most, that the impact is not what she expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote back immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told her about Nora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told her about the Down syndrome diagnosis and the October birth and the dark hair and the indignant cry and the stuffed elephant and the early intervention therapist who came twice a week and the specific, daily, extraordinary experience of being the mother of a child who approaches the world with a completeness of feeling that most adults spend their whole lives trying to recover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told her Nora was the best thing that had ever happened to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claire wrote back within the hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said: “She sounds like someone worth knowing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 5: What Came After
The conversation between Claire Webb and me did not end that morning. It continued \u2014 haltingly at first, with the specific, careful quality of two people who are navigating an unprecedented situation and who are both committed to navigating it honestly \u2014 over the following weeks and months, through a series of messages that became, gradually and without either of us planning it, something that I can only describe as the most unexpected friendship of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to be careful about how I describe it, because I do not want to make it sound simpler or cleaner or more resolved than it was. It was not simple. There were messages that were hard to send and harder to receive. There were weeks when the conversation went quiet because one or both of us needed distance from the specific, complicated weight of what we were to each other. There were things she said that were honest in ways that cost me something to hear, and things I said that I know cost her something to read, and the honesty was not comfortable but it was real, and the realness of it was what made it worth continuing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She told me, in one of the later messages, that talking to me had been easier than talking to Marcus in some ways \u2014 that I had no investment in managing her perception of the situation, no reason to minimize or deflect, and that the specific, unguarded honesty of a woman who has nothing left to protect is a rare and clarifying thing to encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told her that her response to my first message had changed something fundamental in how I understood what grace actually means \u2014 not the easy grace of forgiving someone who has not cost you anything, but the hard grace of a woman who has been genuinely wronged and who chooses, in full knowledge of the cost, to respond with humanity anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus and Claire separated in the spring, eight months after my first message. Claire told me herself, in a message that was matter-of-fact and quiet and that contained, underneath the matter-of-factness, the specific, exhausted relief of a woman who has made a decision she has been approaching for a long time and who has finally arrived at it. She said the counseling had helped her get clear, and what she had gotten clear about was that she did not want to spend the rest of her life rebuilding trust with a man who had demonstrated, more than once, that he was not trustworthy. She said it without bitterness and without drama and with the specific, grounded dignity of a woman who knows her own worth and has decided to act accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told her I was sorry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said: “Don’t be. I’m not.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcus was informed of Nora’s existence through a letter from my attorney in the spring, concurrent with a petition for child support filed in Mecklenburg County Family Court. The legal process was not pleasant \u2014 it rarely is \u2014 but it was straightforward, and Marcus, to his credit or perhaps to the credit of his own attorney’s advice, did not contest paternity once the DNA test confirmed what everyone already knew. A child support order was established. He has complied with it consistently, which I acknowledge because fairness requires acknowledging it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has not asked to meet Nora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have not forced the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have told my attorney that if Marcus chooses to pursue a relationship with his daughter, I will not obstruct it \u2014 that Nora deserves to know her father if her father is willing to show up for her, and that my feelings about Marcus Webb are entirely separate from my daughter’s right to have both of her parents present in her life if that is what she wants. The door is open. What happens next is his choice to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora is two and a half years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has been in early intervention since she was six weeks old \u2014 speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, the specific, ongoing work of a child who is developing on her own timeline and who is doing it with a determination that her therapists describe, consistently and with genuine admiration, as remarkable. She walked at twenty-two months. She has thirty-seven words. She knows the names of every stuffed animal she owns and she distributes them around her crib each night with the specific, deliberate attention of a child who takes her organizational responsibilities seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is, without qualification, the most joyful person I have ever known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do not mean that in the reductive way that people sometimes mean it when they talk about children with Down syndrome \u2014 the specific, well-intentioned but flattening idea that such children are simply happy, as if happiness were their defining and only characteristic. I mean it in the full, complex, individual sense of a child who experiences the world with an intensity of feeling that encompasses frustration and stubbornness and hilarity and tenderness and the specific, fierce love of a person who loves completely and without reservation and who expects to be loved the same way in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is teaching me things about love that I did not know I needed to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claire met Nora for the first time four months ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to tell you about that afternoon, because it was one of the most extraordinary things I have ever witnessed, and because it is the part of the story that I think about most when I am trying to understand what the last two and a half years have meant and what they have made me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met at Freedom Park in Charlotte on a Saturday afternoon in the specific, golden quality of a Carolina fall day \u2014 the light low and warm, the air cool enough for jackets, the park full of the ordinary, irreplaceable sounds of a Saturday. Claire arrived with a small stuffed giraffe that she had wrapped in tissue paper and carried in a tote bag, and she looked \u2014 I want to describe this accurately \u2014 like a woman who is doing something that costs her something and who has decided to do it anyway because she has determined that it is right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora looked at her for a long moment with the specific, unself-conscious assessment of a two-year-old who is deciding what she thinks about a new person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then she held out her hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claire took it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They walked together toward the duck pond, Nora pointing at the ducks with the specific, urgent authority of a child who needs the adults in her vicinity to be aware of the ducks, and Claire following with the specific, slightly undone expression of a woman who was not prepared for how this was going to feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stood back and watched them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about the Sunday evening in December when I had typed and retyped a message seven times and sent it with shaking hands, prepared for the worst and received instead the most unexpected grace of my life. I thought about what it means to be seen honestly by someone who has every reason to see you harshly, and to be met with humanity anyway. I thought about what Nora was going to understand, as she grew older, about the complicated, imperfect, extraordinary circumstances of her arrival in the world \u2014 and about the women who had chosen, in the middle of all that complication, to show her what grace actually looks like when it is practiced by real people in real situations with real costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought about what I wanted her to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want her to know that people are capable of more than the worst thing they have done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want her to know that grace is not the absence of consequences but the presence of humanity inside them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want her to know that the woman who walked her to the duck pond on a Saturday afternoon in October was someone who had been hurt by the circumstances of Nora’s existence and who chose, with full knowledge of that hurt, to show up anyway \u2014 because she had decided that Nora was a person worth knowing, and that the specific, complicated truth of how Nora came to be in the world did not change that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want her to know that I am sorry for the choices I made before she existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I want her to know that I am not sorry for her \u2014 not for a single day, not for a single word, not for a single moment of the specific, extraordinary privilege of being her mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is the truth that came out of my worst mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is the best thing I have ever done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the woman who helped me see that \u2014 the woman who answered a message she had every right to ignore with a grace she had every right to withhold \u2014 is someone I will spend the rest of my life being grateful for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people come into your life through the front door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some come through the wreckage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ones who come through the wreckage, and who choose to stay, are the ones who show you what you are actually made of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claire Webb showed me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora shows me every single day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am still learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope I always am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I Got Pregnant by a Married Man and My Baby Was Born With Down Syndrome. With … I Got Pregnant by a Married Man, and My Baby Was Born With Down Syndrome<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1557,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-family-stories","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1558,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions\/1558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rungbeg.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}