"Now I think that the vast majority of us 'normal' people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered. … Living with Adam, loving Adam, has taught me a lot about the truth. He has taught me to look at things in themselves, not at the value a brutal and often senseless world assigns to them."
In the memoir
Expecting Adam, Martha Beck and her husband John are a young couple caught up in the crazy haze of graduate school at Harvard and new parenthood. Harvard looms like an overbearing, impossible-to-please parent in every corner of their world; the pressure to succeed at Harvard eclipses everything else in their lives. Their world consists of tag-team parenting, little sleep, constant rushing, and determination to stay on top.
And then Martha discovers that she is pregnant again, just as they were starting to figure out how to balance Katie, their toddler, with Harvard and John's new consulting job in Singapore. Martha writes that "motherhood had made me the odd person out among my classmates; they were polite and kind to me but understandably less than fascinated by the details of my life as a nursing mother. I would show up at class after a night in the emergency room, where Katie had been put through a battery of hideously painful tests to determine the cause of some raging illness, and pretend that I really cared abut the contrast between Karl Marx's view of historical necessity and Max Weber's."
Martha is violently ill during pregnancy, barely able to function. A couple of women she barely knew show up at her door, bearing food and emotional support, and she makes actual true friends for the first time in her adult life. Every day is a struggle for Martha and for John during the weeks that he is at Harvard, but they manage—barely.
Martha was violently ill during her first pregnancy, too, but this one is different. She has all kinds of dreams and intuits that something is not right with this pregnancy, and yet rather than panicking, she feels oddly comforted. She finds out much, much later, even years later, that John had similar experiences.
And then they find out the life-changing news: the unborn baby, a boy, has Down Syndrome. They are shocked beyond words. This is Harvard, the land of geniuses and IQs off the charts. There is no room in Harvard for anything "less" than "perfect."
Terminate now, they are told over and over again. John's Harvard mentor, some kind of demi-god, tells John that his career is over if they have this baby.
John and Martha, though both raised in Mormon homes, aren't religious. Both are staunchly pro-choice. But the idea of aborting their baby is abhorrent to Martha and ultimately to John. They have no idea what they will do with a baby with Down Syndrome, but Martha's skills as a researcher kick in, and she finds out everything she can (which, at the time, wasn't much).
From the moment they find out they are expecting Adam, everything changes for Martha and John and Katie. They go from living a life of outrageously high expectations to a life of quiet expectation and joy.
"I really thought there would be a miracle," said John softly… "I really thought God would fix him."
I considered that for a minute. "Maybe he didn't need fixing," I said. "Maybe he's the only one of us who was never broken."
John looked at me. "Are you broken, sweetheart?"
"I was," I said. "Not anymore."
"Same
here," said John. He paused, then gave me a smile—not his manic Harvard
grin but a real smile, one that contained all the sorrow of the past
months, along with the joy. "So," he said, "there's your miracle."
By the time Adam is born, John and Martha are changed people. They are
ready to escape the Harvard life and embrace a calmer life focused on
nurturing relationships. As Martha says, "I have had to unlearn virtually everything Harvard taught me about what is precious and what is garbage. I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kidn of beauty that directly nourishes my soul."
Highly recommended. Martha's writing is fantastic and the story is one you can hardly put down.
