Beck - Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic

Beck writes with an unusual blend of searing detail and self-effacing humor.

Chicago Tribune

This book will make anxious yuppie parents less concerned about whether their first-grader is on the right track for Harvard.

Newark Star-Ledger

It is hardly important that this is a story about bearing and raising an exceptional childa son with Down syndromein exceptional circumstances. Beck is telling it for all women who have raised exceptional children and ended up feeling privileged, and for all mothers who have found communities that put a high value on material accomplishments simply unbearable.

The New York Times Book Review

Her portraits of Harvard academics, omniscient doctors, and uptight in-laws are priceless. Even skeptics will find magic in this story, and parents of a Down syndrome child will cherish it.

Kirkus Reviews

At once wickedly funny and achingly painful, Martha Becks Expecting Adam strikes the perfect chord.

New York Post

As a skeptic of long standing, Im the first to dismiss voices, however angelic, to say nothing of guardian angels. And yet Becks unique voice made me a believer.

Detroit Free Press

Martha Beck sprinkles so many side-splitting quips and hard-fought insights through her poignant memoir that I challenge any reader not to be moved by iteven if, like me, you just cant swallow her belief in angels Beck writes with candor and grace about the mixture of anguish, confusion, and resolve she and her husband experienced through the time they were expecting Adam.

Newsday

Funny.

Hartford Courant

Brilliant.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

I cant believe I almost didnt read this book. The thing is, I thought it was about a lady who had a baby with Down syndrome. This is like saying Anna Karenina is a book about a lady who commits suicide. In fact, this book is about matters so important and yet so totally way-out that I would accept no one but a comic genius with seven years at Harvard under her belt telling me about them. Thats Martha Beck: funny, companionable, razor-sharp, down-to-earth, and onto the Big Secrets of Life Itself. Anyone considering having a child should have to read this book. It has changed some of my thinking about pregnancy and about children with disabilities, and I dont think its too much to say it could change my life.

Marion Winik, author of First Comes Love and The Lunchbox Chronicles

I laughed. I cried. I couldnt put it down. I didnt want it to end. I wish I knew Adam and his familyand, of course, I do. A brave, uplifting, life-transforming book.

Sophy Burnham, author of A Book of Angels

You cant help but cheer them on Beck writes in a furiously funny voice, even when she writes about awful events.

Florida Times-Union

Excellent.

New York Daily News

A good read.

Albany Times-Union

The most deeply moving and instructively relevant treatise I have found in recent years.

Deseret News

Beck is funny, irreverent, chatty, and intelligent [Expecting Adam] probably will make you cry It also will make you very happy for Beck.

Arizona Republic

With uncommon sense and dependable wit, Martha Beck unravels every assumption about the meaning of life, choice, loveand the wisdom of pursuing happiness through any of the usual routes. If Expecting Adam raises suspicions among more rational readers that Martha Beck is slightly crazy, it raised my hopes that Id catch it from her.

Mary Kay Blakely, author of American Mom

Expecting Adam is Martha Becks meticulously written, uplifting, and compassionate account of being gifted with a retarded son who opens her heart to the deep intuitions that love can bring.

Judith Orloff, M.D., author of Second Sight

Steering by Starlight

The Four-Day Win

Leaving the Saints

The Joy Diet

Finding Your Own North Star

Breaking Point

Copyright 1999, 2011 by Martha N. Beck, Ph.D.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

T HERE R IVERS P RESS and the Tugboat design are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for
permission to reprint previously published material:
Broadway Books: Excerpt from The Illuminated Rumi by Coleman Barks and
Michael Green, copyright 1997 by Coleman Barks and Michael Green. Reprinted by permission of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpts from The Layers from The Collected Poems by Stanley Kunitz, copyright 1978 by Stanley Kunitz.
Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999, and in paperback in the United States by Berkley Books, an imprint of the Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., New York, in 2000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beck, Martha Nibley, 1962
Expecting Adam : a true story of birth, rebirth,
and everyday magic / Martha Beck.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Times Books, c1999.
1. Beck, Martha Nibley, 1962 2. PregnancyComplicationsPatientsBiography. 3. FetusAbnormalitiesPatientsBiography. 4. Genetic disorders in pregnancyPatientsBiography. 5. Parents of children with disabilitiesBiography. 6. Parents of children with disabilitiesReligious life. 7. Down syndromePatientsFamily relationships. I. Title.
RG629.D68.B43 2011
618.20092dc22

[B] 2010042258

eISBN: 978-0-307-95401-5

Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright
Cover photography by Richard Tuschman

First Three Rivers Press Edition

v3.1

For my boy

T his 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. Ill call her Mrs. Ross, because it isnt 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 masters degree in art history and a job as an elementary school janitor. I was taking notes, considering what this womans 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 wasnt 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.