This story begins 17 years ago because I just need to talk about this but I promise I'll get to today.

17 years ago my wife and I were attempting to have our first child, had been relatively unlucky for several months and finally my wife was pregnant. I always wanted to be a father and she a mother and we looked forward to meeting our child, even as the doctor gave us the news that she had Down Syndrome.

We cared, we knew what this would mean for our daughter. If you've ever been on the internet you can see just how ruthless people can be to those with mental disabilities. I never expected her to lead a normal life and I knew life would be hard for her but I felt at the time that incredible people where forged in adversity and while my wife had some reservations I convinced her that we could go through with this.

Approximately 9 months later she was born and I fell in love with her then and there all covered in blood and fluids, I didn't care, she was my beautiful baby girl.

As she grew her mother and I became very hopeful, she was hitting her developmental milestones slowly but she could progress. With hard work she could make her disability nothing more than a footnote to her life rather than its defining characteristic. She could read, very slowly and with help, by age seven and was the sweetest girl you could ever meet. It may be my rose tinted glasses but I don't think she had a hateful bone in her body.

I promised we would get to today, I just need to say some of these things, it would be wrong to tell the story out of context.

Skip ahead to her 15th birthday, and her mother and I couldn't be more proud. She came so much farther than doctors, therapists, developmental psychologists said she would and we were so incredibly happy. She had friends from her Peer Buddies (a class dedicated to the mentally handicapped) and she liked her classes and she wanted to be a baker. We bought her a professional mixer and a few baking books. Even with the collapse of the economy and the whole financial world falling apart, my job with it, my wife and I felt we were going to make our daughter more than "a girl with Down Syndrome".

I had meetings with her mentor throughout the year, her mother and I knew that she would face certain social adversities, to say the least. Nothing was ever too bad, it wasn't more than a cry, a good movie and a talk couldn't fix but recently she seemed moody. I attributed it to the mood swings of being a teenager, and I had grossly underestimated the capacity for human cruelty and my own daughters emotional intelligence.

The bullying online we expected, not only did we expect it but we talked to our daughter about it all the time and we'd laugh at it together. We knew it would still hurt, it would still be in the back of her mind and that it would follow her forever but we also knew that she was a strong enough person to move past it.

What we didn't expect was the sexual abuse from one of the gym teachers, or anyone for that matter.

While she was at school I forgot my laptop at my new job and used hers. I found her facebook open and found that her gym teacher had been asking her to stay after class, frequently. As the messages read on I could see that the relationship wasn't strictly professional.

We pressed charges, we won, he is in prison now. He is publicly condemned, my daughter was in therapy and safe.

Her anti depressants didn't help and she began to become a recluse. The bullying to far worse, and those who used to stick up for her distanced themselves. As though she were some how contaminated with some plague, and those who would pick on her knew what she had been through.

She killed herself 2 years after the trial, she overdosed on her anti depressants.

that would be yesterday for me.

I'm at today and I feel nothing but regret, I failed as a father on the most basic level. I failed to keep her safe, I didn't want to shelter her from the world but I should have been there for her or I should have done something to stop this shit.

I fucked up by thinking that by raising her right we could show people that she was a person not just a medical condition and that she was special and not just to her parents. I fucked up by thinking kids her age had a vestige of empathy and I fucked up by thinking that no one would dare abuse my little girl.