If you wear sunglasses, wear black, and walk down the street with a gang of other sleek people behind you wearing sunglasses and wearing black – you’re cool, you’re in. I’m so out, I feel like I need to come out of the closet: Hello world, it’s me! I’m uncool, and I’m proud of it!

I got in the car the other day and put on my $5.00 sunglasses and they snapped, spontaneously. It was my last chance at any ounce of cool. I was going grocery shopping with two kids; green avocado was smeared all over my shirt and something white, that I couldn’t identify, was spotted on my jeans.

I swore I would run in the store and get just a few things. About ¾ of the way through the store, my son needed to breastfeed. There are two places to sit in this store: the wooden bench in front of all the cashiers or the toilet. My son won’t eat with dinging cash registers and rustling bags passing in front of him. I’d fed him in the bathroom before, and I don’t like it. Who wants to eat on the toilet? I’ve sat on the floor before, but I just wasn’t up for the cold ceramic.

I’ve worn both my kids in a sling that goes around my shoulder. If the child and the breast are positioned just so, it is possible to nurse; throw packages of raw chicken into the cart and open a bag of potato chips for the other, non-nursing child.

We continued to the checkout. I turned Addison around so he could face the people and see what’s going on. I dug into the cart for each item and tossed it on the conveyer belt. I reached for the blueberries and looked down at my shirt. My breast was hanging out. I tucked it back into the tank top/bra and flipped the blueberries up by the chicken.

I handed the cashier my credit card. “The system is down,” he said. He and all the other cashiers stood around the manager’s desk while she called each purchase in for approval. The young man who’d bagged my items stood patiently next to my bags of groceries. Had I exposed myself to him? The cashier? After awhile it doesn’t matter who’s seen my “this that or the other thing ” - birth did that to me. Childrearing keeps cementing it in.

I left the market and passed the video store on the left. There they were – the posters with the cool people. Funny thing….I didn’t look anything like them. Now that I’m out of the closet, maybe I could start a whole new kind of cool.

Three months ago, my son’s blood test came back as anemic. But the doctor or the lab never called me with the results. I thought we were just testing for thyroid problems. I figured no news was good news.

“If he stays anemic, he might have cognitive learning problems,” said the doctor.

That statement will hit any parent right in the sternum. Trouble learning? MY KID was going to be different than all those other kids. The words mentally retarded already spun in my mind daily because every book on Trisomy 21 says that this group of children test low for intelligence level.

Funny thing….even with a child with Down Syndrome, I want Addison to be an above average boy. The need to fill our kids with information is a cultural line we’ve been hooked into. We show our kids videos of shiny objects; flash cards at their little faces; teach them where their fingers and toes are; count to ten in 14 languages; learn verb conjugation before toilet training; and possibly, learn the finesse it takes to make a crème brûlèe.

I’m kidding on the last one. But, I’ve slipped into all the traps, in one way or the other, in teaching, and hoping, my kid is going to rise above the cream. Meredith F. Small, a professor of anthropology at Cornell, who’s written several books about children and how we mold them into miniature models of ourselves and all that culture has imposed on us, said that kids are going to learn language at their own pace - no matter what we do to them. They learn by watching us, modeling us. We might get a four year old to sputter bigger words earlier, but he may not understand what “grizzled” means until he can understand the content of a story that needs a word such as grizzled.

I took my son for another blood test. I was grateful that it was only a pin prick to the finger, but his wailing would have suggested otherwise. The nurse put a Band-Aid on his tiny index finger.

“Be careful she,” she said. “He could swallow it.”

Duh, I thought. Why don’t you just give him a sucker and tell him not to suck on it? Addison held up his finger like a prize all the way out to the car. I tried once to pull it off, but he quickly withdrew his finger and kicked liked a bucking bunny.

I told him he could have the bandage as long as he didn’t eat it. He resisted this information, and upon leaving the hospital, he had the thing in his mouth. I stopped the car and fished it out of his mouth. (He loves to hide paper, grass, etc. on the roof of his mouth.) He wailed again, but in less than a minute, he fell asleep. He slept for almost two hours in my car while it was parked in the garage. I guessed he’d needed to recover from all he had learned.