p. 97
Caroline sat down on the floor too. Like Doro, Sandra was an unlikely friend, someone Caroline would never have known in her old life. They’d met in the library one bleak January day when Caroline, overwhelmed by experts and grim statistics, had slammed a book shut in despair. Sandra, two tables over amid her own stack of books, the spines and covers terribly familiar to Caroline, looked up. Oh, I know just how you feel. I’m so angry I could break a window.
They’d begun to talk, then: cautiously at first, then in a rush. Sandra’s son, Tim, was nearly four. He had Down’s too, but Sandra hadn’t known it. That he was slower to develop than her three other children, this she had noticed, but to Sandra slow was only slow, and no excuse for anything. A busy mother, she’d simply expected Tim to do what her other children had done, and if it took him longer that was all right. He’d been walking by the time he was two, toilet trained by age three. The diagnosis had shocked her family; the doctor’s suggestion—that Tim should be put into an institution—had angered her into action.
Caroline had listened intently, her heart lifting with every word.
They left the library and went for coffee. Caroline would never forget those hours, the excitement she’d felt, as if she were waking from a long, slow dream. What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try? (p. 99) For the next two hours, they played with their children and talked. Sandra had strong opinions about everything and was not afraid to speak her mind. Caroline loved sitting in the living room and talking with this smart, bold woman, mother to mother. These days Caroline often longed for her own mother, dead almost ten years now, wishing she could call her up and ask advice or simply stop by to see her hold Phoebe in her arms. had her mother felt all this—the love and the frustration—as Caroline grew up? She must have, and suddenly Caroline understood her childhood differently. The constant worry about polio—the, in its own strange way, was love. And her father’s hard work, his careful concentration on their finances at night—that was love as well.
The Bible and meaningful books 