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Overview
“Slyly ironic, frequently hilarious, [Martha] Beck’s memoir charts the journey from being smart to becoming wise.”—Time
This edition includes a new afterword about Adam.
From the moment Martha and her husband, John, accidentally conceived their second child, all hell broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with success. After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more. They’d plotted out a future in the most vaunted ivory tower of academe.
But when their unborn son, Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard community warned them that if they decided to keep the baby, they would lose all hope of achieving their carefully crafted goals.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what happened. By the time Adam was born, Martha and John were propelled into a world in which they were forced to redefine everything of value to them, put all their faith in miracles, and trust that they could fly without a net. And it worked.
Expecting Adam captures the abject terror and exhilarating freedom of facing impending parenthood, being forced to question one’s deepest beliefs, and rewriting life’s rules.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307719645 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harmony/Rodale |
| Publication date: | 08/02/2011 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 187,271 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.78(w) x 5.32(h) x 0.82(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
This happened when Adam was about three years old.
I was sitting in a small apartment with a woman I had barely met, talking to her about her life. I'll call her Mrs. Ross, because it isn't her name. I had been doing similar interviews for months, collecting data for my Ph.D. dissertation. Mrs. Ross was a scrawny forty-five-year-old with a master's degree in art history and a job as an elementary school janitor. I was taking notes, considering what this woman's experience had to teach about the real-world value of the more refined academic fields, when she suddenly stopped talking.
There was a moment of silence, and then I looked up and said, "Yes?" in a helpful voice, which was normally enough to keep an interview rolling. But Mrs. Ross wasn't acting normal. She had been sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair, both feet set firmly on the floor and her hands resting primly on her knees. Now she was curled into an almost fetal position, forearms crushed between the tops of her thighs and her chest, her eyes tightly closed.
I became alarmed. "Are you all right?" I said, trying to sound politely but not overly curious.
Mrs. Ross waved a hand at me. "I can't ... quite ... make it out," she said.
I just stared at her.
"Usually," she gasped, her eyelids clamping down tighter, "usually I can tell which side of the veil it's coming from ... that's usually the first thing I can tell ... but this time I ... can't."
"Uh-huh," I said cautiously, glancing toward the door, wondering if I could get to it before Mrs. Ross leapt upon me like a mad dog.
"It's like ... he's not really on one side of the veil or the other ... maybe he's on both." She shook her head, troubled. "At least I know it's a he."
"Uh, Mrs. Ross," I said, gathering my notes together for a quick exit.
At this point Mrs. Ross's eyes flew open wide, fixing me with a bloodshot stare.
"You know who it is!" she said in a low, accusing voice. "You know who it is, but you're blocking!"
At this point my curiosity began to get the better of me. "I know who?" I said.
"That's right!" Mrs. Ross uncurled a little. "You see, I have this ... well, it's a gift." She sounded as though she wasn't quite sure Santa had gotten her letters.
"Gift?" I repeated.
She nodded. "I get messages for people." She sighed and sat up. "There was a point in my life when I stopped talking about it, you know, because it's very embarrassing."
"Oh," I said.
"And then, you know," Mrs. Ross continued, "I began to lose it. It was getting fainter, and sometimes the spirits would be angry at me, because I wouldn't help them get through to people."
At this moment, I swear to God, a large green parrot walked out of Mrs. Ross's small kitchen and into the living room. It paced slowly across the carpet, peered at me suspiciously with one flinty eye, then proceeded on foot up the leg of Mrs. Ross's chair and onto her shoulder. She's a witch, I thought. I'm sitting here talking to a genuine witch. The parrot was obviously a familiar. I would have been willing to bet it was her husband.
Mrs. Ross kept talking, stroking the bird absentmindedly. "So I promised God that I would always deliver the messages as soon as I got them. No matter what."
"No kidding." I said this without any sarcasm. That's how much I had changed. Four years earlier I would have dismissed Mrs. Ross and her "gift" immediately. Back then I had known exactly how the world worked. Back then I had been sure of my own intellect, sure of the primacy of Reason, sure that, given enough time and training, I could control my destiny. That was before Adam. But now it was four years later, and Adam was at home with the baby-sitter, and I had learned a lot about how much I had to learn. So I sat still and waited for Mrs. Ross to go on. She did.
"The messages are usually from the other side of the veil—I mean, from the spirit world," she said. "Sometimes they're from living people who are far away and need to get a message through immediately. But that's always the first thing I can tell—which side of the veil the message is coming from." Her brow furrowed. "And this time, I can't tell"
By now, I admit it, I was hooked. I wanted my message.
"Just relax," I suggested helpfully.
Mrs. Ross shot me a glance that would have pierced steel, a glance designed to shove me off her turf.
"Or not," I said.
"We should pray," whispered Mrs. Ross.
"Uh, okeydokey," I responded. I mean, what would you have done?
So Mrs. Ross and I bowed our heads, and I drew a deep breath and relaxed for just a second, and then her head snapped up like a Pez dispenser and she said, "All right, you stopped blocking. It's your son."
"My son?" Even after everything that had already happened, this surprised me. I had been hoping the message would be from my guardian angel, or perhaps a stray ancestor with an interest in my career.
"You have a son who's halfway between worlds," stated Mrs. Ross.
I felt the hair go up on my arms. You see, no matter how much evidence you have, over time you tend to block out the experiences that aren't "normal." Who wants to turn into a Mrs. Ross, blurting out gibberish about spirits and veils? How much of that sort of conversation are you allowed before people stop inviting you to parties, and you end up pushing a mop in an elementary school?
"Well" I said to Mrs. Ross, "maybe I do have a son ... uh ... like that."
She gave me a withering look. "You do," she said flatly. "And he wants me to give you a message." The parrot nibbled tenderly on her ear.
By now my whole body was bristling with a strange electricity. The sensation had become familiar to me over the past few years, yet it was always a surprise. At least I kept my mouth shut.
Mrs. Ross closed her eyes again, gently this time. "He says that he's been watching you very closely from both sides of the veil."
The veil again.
"He says that you shouldn't be so worried. He says you'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been hurt by remaining closed"
She opened her eyes, scratched the parrot's head, and smiled. She didn't look like a witch at all anymore.
"That's it?" I said.
Mrs. Ross nodded, smiling.
I didn't return the smile. "What the heck is that supposed to mean?"
She shrugged. "Beats me."
"Oh, come on," I pleaded. "There's got to be more. Ask him." This is not the way I was taught to behave at Harvard.
"I don't ask questions," she said. "I just deliver messages. Like Western Union. What the messages mean is none of my business."
And that was all she had to say.
After a pathetic attempt to pretend I was still conducting an interview, I raced home to confront Adam. He was in his crib, asleep. He was about half the size of a normal three-year-old, had barely learned to walk, and had never spoken an intelligible word. I reached down and poked him in the tummy, and he woke up with his usual jolly grin on his face.
I looked into his small, slanted eyes. "Adam," I said seriously. "You've got to tell me. Are you sending me messages through Mrs. Ross?"
His smile broadened. That was all. And he hasn't said a thing about it since.
So here I am, still wondering what the hell happened that day, wondering whether Mrs. Ross was really channeling my three-year-old, wondering what he meant. I wonder a lot of things, since Adam came along. I wonder about all the strange and beautiful and terrible things that accompanied him into my life. My husband, John, knows about my wondering—shares it, in fact, since his life, too, was changed when we were expecting Adam. But when I wasn't talking to John, I learned to keep it all to myself. I learned to ignore the miraculous in my life, to pretend it didn't exist, to tell lies in order to be believed. In short, I kept myself closed.
This has not been easy. It is difficult not to tell people when one of your interview subjects turns out to be Parrot Woman. The strangeness, the curiosity, the wonder keeps pushing outward, begging to be communicated, needing air and company. On many occasions, I have tried to talk about Adam without letting on that I actually believed in everything that happened to me. I have written this book twice already, both times as a novel, to wit: "This is the story of two driven Harvard academics who found out in midpregnancy that their unborn son would be retarded. To their own surprise and the horrified dismay of the university community, the couple ignored the abundant means, motive, and opportunity to obtain a therapeutic abortion. They decided to allow their baby to be born. What they did not realize is that they themselves were the ones who would be 'born,' infants in a new world where magic is commonplace, Harvard professors are the slow learners, and retarded babies are the master teachers."
You see, by calling it a novel, I could tell the story without putting myself in danger from skeptics, scientists, and intellectuals. "Fiction!" I would assure them. "Made it all up! Not a word of truth in it!" Then they would all go away and leave me alone, and perhaps a few sturdy souls would be willing to believe me, and I could open up in safety to them.
It hasn't worked out that way. The editors and agents and writers I respect most have always come back, after reading my "novel," with the same question: "Excuse me, but how much of this is fiction?" And I would hem and haw a bit before admitting that aside from making John and myself sound much better-looking than we are, I didn't fictionalize anything. It's all true, I would say. Then I would sink into my chair five or six inches and wait for them to call security.
So far, that hasn't happened. It has been five years since Mrs. Ross reared back against her parrot and delivered Adam's message, and in all that time my favorite people have continually repeated his advice. Open up, they say. It will feel better than remaining closed.
I am none too sure about this. I am very much afraid of being caught in the firestorms of controversy over abortion, genetic engineering, medical ethics. It worries me to think that I will be lumped together with the right-to-lifers, not to mention every New Age crystal kisser who ever claimed to see an angel in the clouds over Sedona. I am reluctant to wave good-bye to my rationalist credibility. Nevertheless, the story will not stop unfolding, and it will not stop asking me to tell it. I have resisted it for what feels like a very long time, hoping it would back off and disappear. But it hasn't.
So, Mrs. Ross, wherever you are, thank you for delivering my son's message. After all these years, I've finally decided to listen.
Chapter Two
John and I disagree about the precise moment we lost control of our lives. He thinks it was the car accident in New Hampshire. I say it was two weeks before that, when Adam was conceived. Either way, it was sometime in September of 1987, which ever since has been known in our family history as the month It All Went to Hell.
We had just returned to Cambridge from a summer in Tokyo, where John had been doing research for a Ph.D. dissertation on the Japanese employment system. We were dazed with jet lag, which is bad enough for an adult crossing fourteen time zones but turns into an epic struggle when you're traveling with a toddler. Our eighteen-month-old daughter, Katie, was still operating on Japanese time, babbling and playing through the Boston nights while John and I took turns trying to sleep. By the time the sun showed up and Katie closed her maddeningly bright little eyes, we would have to stumble off, haggard and woozy, to deal with the welter of logistical tasks involved in preparing to go to Harvard.
Again.
There are some things you have to understand about Harvard. First of all, John and I both grew up there. I'm not talking about childhood. I mean later on, when all our adult thoughts and expectations were being programmed. As for childhood, we both spent that in the same small town in Utah, a state that doesn't register as part of the known universe to anyone in the Ivy League. (One of my professors once told me he'd just returned from my region of the country. I said, "Oh really? Where?" He said, "Iowa." And he meant it.) As a matter of fact, this writing marks the first time I've actually admitted in public that I am a child of the lovely Beehive State. Harvard trained me to believe that this is like admitting to a history of mental illness or shoplifting. It would have bought me much more credibility if I'd been able to claim that I'd been reared by wolves.
The point is that neither John nor I relied on anything that happened to us before Harvard to guide our behavior once we got there. John arrived when he was eighteen, and I showed up two years later, in 1980, aged seventeen. We had known each other in high school, but only vaguely; by the time we really got acquainted, we'd both managed to become thoroughly Harvardized. We had a lot in common: the dirty secret of our western public school past, an intense drive to succeed, a longing to fit in. We worked like demons, taking heavy loads of the most difficult classes we could find, so that when we got the phone call saying that the admissions department had just realized its glaring mistake in accepting us, we'd have a fighting chance of remaining enrolled. As a result, we did well academically and ended up going to Harvard over and over again, like addicts. We both applied to combined master's and Ph.D. programs before we'd even graduated from the college. John pursued his passionate study of Asia, while I focused on the sociology of gender. By September of 1987 we had been Harvard students for almost a third of our lives, and we weren't anywhere near finished.
You might assume from all this that John and I found Harvard pleasant. Oh, how wrong you would be. Actually, I don't know if I ever met anyone at Harvard who found it pleasant. It seems to me (although I may well be projecting) that all the people there scurry anxiously from one achievement to another, casting wary glances over their shoulders, never quite sure that they've managed to throw failure off their scent. To me, being a student there was heady, exciting, even thrilling, but these sensations came laced with heavy doses of fear and misery. It was like having lunch with a brilliant, learned, witty celebrity who liked to lean across the table at unpredictable intervals and slap me in the mouth—hard. Was it interesting? Very. Stimulating? In more ways than one. Pleasant? I don't think so.
And so, no matter how many times we did them, the muddle of small tasks surrounding each semester's registration always threw John and me into jittering anxiety that made us snap at each other and break things accidentally. Of course, neither of us would have confessed this under torture, not even to each other. We had been trained against it. At Harvard, the appearance of confidence is essential to social survival. Without it, you're like the wounded animal in the herd, attracting the full attention of predators and the disdain of most potential mates. (It was only after John and I fell in love, during finals the first semester of his senior year at Harvard, that I worked up the courage to tell him how scared I was of failing. He had confessed to similar feelings. This interchange was enough to bond us forever. It was more intimate than sex.)
Now John was in the third year of his doctoral program, and no one would have guessed that he'd ever had a moment of lagging confidence. He appeared sublimely self-assured despite the fact that not only was he finishing his degree (which would have been stressful in itself) but he had also jumped at an opportunity to work as a management consultant. The firm that hired him had a branch in Boston and was opening a new one in Singapore. John's job involved commuting from New England to Southeast Asia every two weeks during the upcoming year. This would be a tricky thing to pull off without ruffling various feathers at Harvard, so John was even more nervous than usual. Of course, no one knew this except me, and I was just guessing.
To say that hiding my fears did not come naturally to me is to make a profound understatement. I had a tendency to babble hysterically and blink a lot whenever I dealt with Harvard. At least I'd learned to fake self-confidence, probably as well as the next graduate student. I was very deliberate about this. Before I went on the campus for any reason, I would consciously call up a portion of my personality I call Fang. I would focus very hard on being Fang, until I could squash down every thought or feeling that wasn't part of her. Fang fit in beautifully at Harvard. She was fearless, aggressive, sardonic, voraciously competitive. She never ate entire pound bags of M & M's or sat with her feet in the bathroom sink, crying, the way I was wont to do after a hard day's lunch with the slapping celebrity. I had relied on Fang since my freshman year, and she had served me well. But for some reason, in the fall of 1987 I couldn't quite get her revved up. It wasn't just the jet lag, the fatigue, the change of climate. Even then, when Adam was almost entirely unassembled, I knew it was something more.
I remember the very moment I felt the life controls slip out of my fingers. It was the first time since our return from Tokyo that Katie actually dozed off before sunrise. John and I were both trying, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep ourselves. We stared fitfully at the ceiling, the walls, the window that looked out over Harvard Square, thinking about the dangers that awaited us at daybreak. And then, somewhere toward morning, we rolled over simultaneously, met in the center of our queen-size futon, and began to grope for comfort in each other's arms. I told myself it was a bad idea. I told myself I'd better get some rest while Katie was napping. I told these things to John, too. He agreed with me. And then, of course, we went right ahead with it.
In Japan I had seen a style of puppet theater called Bunraku, where the puppeteers stand right onstage, moving these elegant dolls around without the slightest pretense of invisibility. The puppeteers are so skillful that you actually forget they're on the stage, even though there are often three of them to each puppet. After a few minutes, you'd swear the puppets were moving themselves. That night in our apartment, I kept expecting to see two teams of Bunraku masters standing behind John and me, pulling levers in our heads, sculpting every move we made. I could feel them. And without letting it anywhere near my conscious mind, I knew—I knew—that I was in the process of getting pregnant, and that it was exactly what I wanted to do.
Mind you, this was insane. I didn't have time to be pregnant. I was well aware of this, because I (or at least Fang) was the kind of person who made elaborate and detailed plans for my life several years in advance. I am not exaggerating here. You could always tell where I'd been by following the trail of paper scraps with time grids and to-do lists scribbled on them. I was the unofficial mascot of the Franklin Dayplanner people, my schedule fixed in fifteen-minute intervals for years to come. That September was the worst possible time for me to exercise my fertility option. I was taking a full load of classes, teaching sections for a course in Caribbean society, and planning to be Katie's single parent when John was in Asia. The very last thing I could afford to do was bear live young again. For one thing, during my first go-round, pregnancy had made me feel only slightly better than the Ebola virus would have. For another thing, I had to guard my reputation as a scholar.
I understand that nowadays there are enough young parents in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to support a graduate student "parenting center," but this was not true when I was young and fruitful of loin. Back then, even the potential for motherhood was most definitely a blot on the credibility of female students and staff. I had several friends who obtained abortions when accidental pregnancies threatened to scuttle their academic progress. One woman I knew decided, with her husband, to abort a planned pregnancy when a crucial three-day exam was scheduled near her due date. I don't know whether she even asked if the exam could be rescheduled. That sort of thing simply wasn't done—especially not for "personal reasons."
It often seemed to me that success at Harvard depended on being willing to put "personal reasons" so low on one's priority list that they dropped right off the bottom. John and I had learned this lesson the hard way. For instance, a year and a half before It All Went to Hell, when John was going through the first year of the Harvard Business School curriculum (en route to his Ph.D. in organizational behavior), he missed a day of class taking me to the hospital and Lamaze-coaching me through Katie's birth. The next day, when he went back to the Business School after forty-eight hours without sleep, he received a tongue-lashing that made him wake up in a cold sweat for months afterward. It was delivered in front of the eighty-nine other students in the class by one of his professors, a world-renowned economic theorist I will call Stinky.
"You are a disgrace to this institution," ranted Stinky, while John's classmates sat looking uncomfortably at the floor. "You will never succeed in business, scholarship, or anything else. You have set a bad example for this entire section, and I intend to hold you personally responsible for the poor performance of any student in this room."
When John mumbled that he had wanted to see his child's birth, the professor sneered, said, "You probably think that's a good excuse," and suggested that John should fail out of the class then and there.
You've got to understand that we took this very seriously. I had been away from Harvard for years before I began to realize that not everyone in the United States would agree with Stinky. What amazes me now is that, at the time, both John and I assumed that everyone in the Real World (read: anywhere but Utah) shared Stinky's opinions. So you can see why getting pregnant again on the very eve of an academic year was not part of my conscious master plan, and why that night on our futon felt so trancelike and alien to me. It was like swimming against a riptide: you think you're making lots of progress as you slap away at the water, not even feeling the current, because it is so large and powerful that you aren't able to comprehend it. Then you look at the shore and realize you are in a place you never intended to be.
After that first moment, during our sleepless night on the futon, I felt this sensation often. I tried to explain it to John, but I didn't really know how to articulate it, and he didn't know what I was talking about. Then, of course, came the car accident, and after that I didn't need to explain.
We were headed north at the time, into the gorgeous deciduous forests of upper New England. The trees in that part of the country put on a truly awesome autumn display. The sky is so blue it makes you want to cry, and the leaves look like they're on fire. The traffic out of Boston and into the backwoods of New Hampshire is pretty much bumper to bumper, although it moves along at a good, fast clip. Everyone goes north in the autumn. The volume and brilliance of the foliage is a major topic of conversation at the innumerable wine and cheese parties that kick off every academic year. John and I didn't own a car, but we were tired of being left out of these discussions, so we'd rented one to go up to New Hampshire. We were planning to spend a few days at a cabin with some friends, to celebrate surviving registration and returning to our native time zone.
We had left Massachussetts behind us and were cruising along on the freeway to Franconia when, for no apparent reason, a battered Chevy truck pulled off the shoulder, at right angles to the flow of traffic, and stopped directly in our path. There was no room, no time, to do anything. I heard John give a strangled yell as our car yawed violently and began to spin like a top across our lane and into the path of the oncoming traffic. The Chevy loomed up at me through the passenger window, then disappeared into a blur of leaves, which disappeared behind an eighteen-wheeler, then leaves again, then a Volkswagen bus, leaves, cars, leaves, cars, leaves. On our way home, we would stop at the site and see from the skid marks that we had spun around at least four times, careening across both lanes of the busy highway twice. I still can't see any way we could have done that without being hit, probably several times. But we did.
The odd thing is that I never had any doubt we were completely safe. I remember being mildly concerned that the spinning motion might make Katie carsick. I tried to turn around to look at her, strapped into her car seat behind me, but I was pinned against my own seat by a centrifugal force stronger than anything I had ever felt. I couldn't even move my head. So I just relaxed and watched the leaves go by.
All of this took about two seconds, maybe three. As we Tilt-A-Whirled back into our own lane and onto the shoulder, I could hear the brakes screaming and feel the car slowing down. Then there was a loud pop! and we were all thrown forward against our seat belts. We had hit the wooden post of a stop sign, breaking it in two and denting our bumper. I watched the top half of the sign tremble, sway, and collapse into the dust like a martyred lollipop.
We sat in silence for a minute, taking a mental inventory of our limbs and digits, before John reached forward to turn off the ignition. His hands, like his face, had gone bone white. I felt fine, except that my seat belt had clamped down too tight. I also detected a strange sensation in my lower abdomen, as though someone was pressing a firm but gentle thumb against my bladder. I seemed to remember having felt it before, but I couldn't remember when. I looked over at John. He was clutching the steering wheel as though his life depended on it, which, come to think of it, it did.
"I lost control!" he gasped, as though this were an unfathomable mystery.
"Uh-huh," I said. I turned around and looked at Katie, who was beaming at me from her car seat.
"Whee!" she said.
I laughed. "That was fun, wasn't it, Boofus?"
"Do again?" she asked hopefully.
"No, honey, I'm not sure Daddy could do it again." I turned to smile at John, because the whole situation seemed so interesting. My reaction could have come from shock, I suppose, but all I remember is an entirely inappropriate—though rock solid—sense of well-being. John was still staring straight ahead, gripping the wheel.
"I lost control," he repeated. He was trembling.
I began to wonder why John was making such a big deal about this. True, it was probably the first time since he was potty trained that John had ever lost control of anything. But it was utterly obvious to me that we had never been in any danger. The Bunraku puppeteers wouldn't have allowed it. At this thought, the hair began to prickle all over my body, because I could feel them again. They were all around us, all around the car, as powerful and invisible as an ocean current. And I suddenly knew why John was so thoroughly spooked. He hadn't lost control to the forces of nature. He had lost control to them.
There was a sudden, loud rap on the window by my head. John and I jumped so violently that only our seat belts saved us—again—from bashing our heads against the windshield. I turned to see two old men in overalls standing by the car, peering into the interior. I rolled down my window.
"The grace a God was with you then!" one of the men told us in a thin, accusatory voice, as though we had stayed out too late after the prom.
"The grace a God," echoed the other man. He was wearing a fluorescent orange hunting cap, and his voice was thick and slow. He had the strangest pale-silver eyes I had ever seen. I could tell immediately that he was not, shall we say, fully cooked.
"Car still runnin'?" asked the first man.
John turned toward him and gave him a huge smile. The more upset John is, the happier he acts. It's a Harvard thing.
"Everything's great!" he said, grinning like a maniac. He turned the key, and the car vroomed obediently.
"Everything's great!" the man in the hat repeated in a singsong voice. I couldn't stop looking at him. Retarded people had always filled me with revulsion. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. The puppeteers wouldn't let me.
"Okay!" John chirped, like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on an especially magical day. "I guess we'd better get going!" He put the car in reverse and backed slowly, cautiously, away from the stump of the stop sign.
The first man grunted, turned, and walked away from the car. The one in the hat was still watching me.
"He's a good baby, ma'am," he said. "You take good care of that baby."
I remember being puzzled that he had taken Katie for a boy. I thought of correcting him but decided it wasn't worth the effort. For some reason (probably the aftereffects of the accident), I felt gooseflesh rising on the back of my neck. I gave the man an artificial smile, mostly because I was so glad we were getting away from him. The pressure against my bladder seemed to grow stronger, and I suddenly remembered when I had felt it before. It was the first sign I'd had that I was pregnant with Katie.
John was driving very carefully, searching the road intently. "Did you see that idiot?" he said.
"The guy in the hat?" I said.
John glanced at me as though I were short a few brain cells myself. "No," he said. "The guy in the truck."
"Oh, the truck. Yeah, sure ..."
"He pulled right into my lane!" John fumed. "Right into it!"
"I know, honey" I said, trying to sound soothing. "It was all his fault."
"I ought to report him," said John. He wasn't trembling anymore, but his shirt was soaked with sweat. I thought about continuing to play the supportive wife, encouraging him to vent his testosterone rage on the enemy trucker, but I was too preoccupied searching my memory for any acts of indiscretion involving birth control.
"Let it go, John," I said. "He's long gone."
We'd been very careful, I was sure we had. I was particularly cautious about contraception since my physiology had proven incompatible with birth control pills. That night in the apartment, when the ocean current had caught me and carried me along with it, John and I had been as conscientious as usual. But I was well aware that the methods of contraception at my disposal were not fail-safe.
"He's going to kill somebody," John brooded. A car passed us on the left, and he jerked the steering wheel much too hard to the right.
"Just relax," I said. "It was a freak accident." I was trying to make my voice sound the way Mister Rogers's does when he's telling viewers they can't go down the drain, but it cracked with tension. John didn't notice. He was too busy slamming on the brakes to avoid a falling leaf.
We went along that way for the next fifty miles, John driving like someone's grandmother, while I did my best to reassure him that everything was fine. But deep down in my heart—well, all right, deep down in my bladder—I knew better.
What People are Saying About This
Set half in Harvard and half in heaven, Expecting Adam is a tough-minded yet tender-hearted book of spiritual discovery—a rueful, riveting, piercingly funny, thoroughly modern and deeply old-fashioned memoir: In short, a book to be reckoned with.
"Wickedly funny and wrenchingly sad memoirs of a young mother awaiting the birth of a Down syndrome baby while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate at Harvard. . . . Even skeptics will find magic in this story, and parents of a Down syndrome child will cherish it." —-Kirkus
Expecting Adam is not one of those grit-your-teeth, lemons-into-lemonade sagas that leave the reader feeling more besieged and guilty than the writer. It is a long hymn, from a practical woman caught flatfooted by amazing grace. Martha Beck is a celebrant skeptics can trust.
— Author of The Deep End of the Ocean
A wonderful book, funny, unbelievably tender, and smart. It shimmers.
— Author of Operating Instructions and Traveling Mercies
I laughed. I cried. I couldn't put it down. I didn't want it to end. I wish I knew Adam and his family—and of course I do. A brave, uplifting, life-transforming book.
Interviews
An Interview with Martha Beck, Author of Expecting Adam
Barnes & Noble.com: What kind of response have you gotten to Expecting Adam since it was published last year?
Martha Beck: The most important thing has been the number of parents who have called and written to tell me about their own children with various disabilities. It's been incredibly humbling, because here I wrote this whiny book about this terrible thing that happened to me, and compared to some of the things that other people have been through, it was nothing. But nobody points that out. Everyone is incredibly kind and gracious. I expected a lot more flak, frankly.
B&N.com: Why?
MB: Well, I spoke to a woman the other day who couldn't believe that I wrote this book. I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "It must have destroyed your reputation -- your career must've gone right in the potty." I was living in an environment where you don't talk about believing that you had supernatural help, or that it's okay to be retarded. I was all prepared for a lot of hostility, and instead I've gotten so much sweetness from people.
B&N.com: Did you feel that publishing the book was somewhat cathartic?
MB: I really feel that people don't need to read your therapy. Everybody's miserable, everybody's got to get through something. By the time I wrote the last draft, I'd really come to terms emotionally with the whole experience, and I was very much at peace. It wasn't just a piece of therapy anymore; it was a story about this incredible little kid and the mystery surrounding his birth. And I think that just makes better reading.
B&N.com: I don't have any direct experience with Down syndrome, yet I was so moved by this book. I found it really exhilarating -- I was reading it on the subway and late at night and waiting in line. I was rooting for you in the book. At some point you write that you were hoping, even unconsciously, that the tests were wrong and that the baby would be born normal. I found that I was hoping he would be born with Down syndrome, but that it would be somehow transformative for you. Do you think Expecting Adam touches many people in the same way?
MB: I always say that I didn't write the book for people with disabilities, I wrote it for the poor slobs at Harvard. What it really is about is not dealing with Adam's disability but dealing with my own, which was this desperate belief that I could never be good enough, I could never achieve enough, I could never be intelligent enough. I think that every child who goes through the school system is vulnerable to that kind of pain. Now I really understand a lot better what it's like to be constantly compared to other people along these very, very narrow and limited measurements. Everybody experiences that, and I think that's what a lot of people identified with. It's that terrible fear that we ourselves are never going to be enough.
B&N.com: Has anyone at Harvard softened in the meantime?
MB: There's a woman professor at Harvard Divinity School who wrote me a letter and sent me a syllabus to prove that she'd assigned the book as required reading. Here is this book that I thought would destroy any hope of my ever being accepted at Harvard, and it's now required reading in a class!
B&N.com: Is that enough to tempt you to return to that kind of culture?
MB: No. I developed a really strong confidence through the whole thing that when it's time for us to do certain things in our life or go certain places, we'll feel it strongly and circumstances will conspire to encourage it. I may someday consider going back to academia, but right now I think that's about as likely as me going into exotic dance. [laughs] It just does not sound good.
B&N.com: Has Adam read the book?
MB: I don't think that his reading skills are up to that yet, but he definitely knows what it's about. I've seen him looking through it. And he has some of the posters that were shown in book tours hanging in his room. It happened before he was old enough to realize that it's unusual to have a book written about you. Now he just thinks this is the way everyone should live. [laughs] We just went to Jamaica and he met the prime minister, and he just sort of feels that that's the way it's supposed to go!
My oldest daughter, Katie, got really clingy one morning and wanted to crawl into bed with me. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong at first, but then she admitted that she'd read the manuscript. I said, "Oh, honey that must've brought back so many memories," and she said, "No, it's not that, it's just that the book is so emotionally charged." She's so precocious. It's funny, the contrast between having two very gifted little girls and then Adam, who is gifted in a completely different way.
B&N.com: You write a lot about the magic that entered your life from the time that you became pregnant with Adam. "Magic" is kind of an overused word in our culture; it can mean anything from coincidence to joy. But your use of "magic" is often literal. The story that stays with me is the one about the fire in your apartment building; you realize later that the man who rescued you from the building was possibly not a real human being. It was a chilling story. Do you still have that kind of magic in your life, even if the experiences aren't so dramatic?
MB: I really do believe that the world is a lot more mysterious than we think. In every other culture there is acknowledgement that people have these mystical and magical experiences, that they're just part of the human experience. I think if you cultivate it, it actually grows. I did that a lot after Adam was born, because I was not totally over it; I had to know how it worked. I still do the thing where if [my husband] John is gone, I can try and see where he is -- and nine times out of ten, it works pretty well. I was writing a proposal for another book and all of a sudden I thought, Maybe I'll write about that tribe in Africa where all the men at puberty paint themselves in white and then go into the forest and burn all their possessions. I'm typing this and I start thinking, What tribe? I don't know anything about this tribe! [laughs] An hour later John called me from Africa and told me how he spent the whole morning with this cool tribe where the men paint themselves white and burn all their possessions. So I called my editor at Times Books, and I told her about it and she said, "It works! It works!"
B&N.com: You also tell a really great story about when you and your children were in a garden store and Adam was sniffing around the plants and you told him to hurry up. An older man beckoned you all back and said, "Do you see what he's doing?" And then you all spent some time smelling all the plants and flowers. When you learn that the man has a child with a disability, you describe him as "one of us." Did publishing this book sharpen that sense of belonging to a new community?
MB: Oh, yeah. I had no idea how many families are touched by some kind of disability in a child. It's one in every 600 or 800 live births with Down syndrome alone, and then you count all the other types of things that can go wrong when children are being born. Instead of being isolated or uniquely cursed, you've just entered a huge fraternity of people who know what it's like to have something happen like this in their family. It's quite wonderful, because it bonds you with humanity. I thought there would be a few people I would connect with; instead it's almost everyone!
B&N.com: What other projects are you working on now?
MB: In March, I have a book coming out called Your Own North Star, which is about the work I've been doing with clients. I teach in a business school, and my students became fascinated with the way I approach life and asked me to design a course around it. Then they started hiring me outside of class. I try to put people sort of artificially through the same kind of process I went through because of Adam.
B&N.com: In what way?
MB: People always told me there's a certain way to live and a certain way to have a successful life and to be happy and this is how to do it -- you go to Harvard, etc. That was the message I got. What I found was that when I ostensibly threw away everything that was supposed to make me successful, like choosing to have the baby, what I'd done was place myself outside the system. And I found that I could choose to be anything I wanted. For example a couple of years after Adam was born, John and I decided we both hated academia so we quit our jobs. We didn't have any income at all for 18 months. We'd literally get up in the morning and say, "What seems right today?" [laughs] And then we'd do it. That's the way I talked to my business school students, and that's what's in my new book.
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