Free The Still Point Of The Turning World by Emily Rapp Page B

metaphor and plot. Sometimes she added beautiful pencil illustrations in the margins. Our classrooms were often mysteriously without air-conditioning, and so we did a lot of our writing outside. Sananda liked to be apart from the others. I’d see her sitting in a patch of shade away from the group; writing, yes, but sometimes looking dreamily off into space. Once I watched her turn her hand over and over again in the stream of water from a fountain for almost five minutes. She smiled at me when she turned her stories in and then trotted off to the cafeteria, where every day, without fail, she ate French fries and a chocolate milkshake for lunch (ah, writers and their rituals). During mealtimes the other kids rattled off the different camps they were attending that summer: Shakespeare camp, drama camp, dude ranch camp, art camp. “That’s a lot of camps,” I said to one girl. “My parents like to get rid of me during the summer,” she said matter-of-factly, and turned away to fill her glass with a weird mixture of Coke and Sprite. Sananda dipped her fries into her milkshake (two at a time, I noticed, always two) and stared out the window. I wondered why she was so different from the others.
    And then I met the kids’ parents. One mother demanded that her son put a quarter in a jar during mealtimes if he didn’t use a new vocabulary word during conversation (apparently she kept an exhaustive list at the dinner table). A father asked me, “Approximately how long, in terms of hours, should it take him to complete a publishable short story?” My response—“Decades”—did not go over well. Another mother told me that even though her son wasn’t as smart as his sister, she hoped that he could
at least
show some creative prowess; otherwise he’d never get into Harvard, and that would clearly be a disaster. The kids sat with their parents during these conversations and heard every critical word. I felt them shrinking before my eyes, and all my desperate heaps of praise in that moment would never compensate for the scathing critiques from the two people in the world who were supposed to love them absolutely, without conditions and without strings.
    And then there was Sananda’s mom. This was her question: “Is my daughter having fun? She looks so happy right now.” I told her I thought Sananda
was
having fun (“I am!” Sananda agreed), and that she was also quite talented. “Well,” said her mother, affectionately ruffling her daughter’s hair, “of course she is. We just want her to explore and have a good time this summer. And she likes to tell stories and she loves to read.” I was almost a decade away from being a mother, but I remember thinking that this mother’s attitude about her daughter’s particular gifts was a lesson in how to mother a child (and the way I had been mothered myself). I also worried that I would fail, that I would push my child too hard.
    While my parents were still staying with us, Rick and I went out for a Valentine’s Day dinner, but it was hardly romantic. We struggled with what to say to each other. We were used to talking about the baby, planning for the future, looking forward, tracking change. Gone were our plans for Ronan’s future. Gone was our hope. How could we talk about what was coming next—seizures, blindness, death—over samosas and vegetable biryani? We ate in silence and on the drive home I started to cry. The stars looked mean and bright and close in an unyielding winter sky. “It’s as if there’s another baby behind this baby, and we’ll never get to meet him.” Rick agreed this was unfair. I stopped crying and we rode home in silence. What about all the things I’d imagined that Ronan might be or become without Tay-Sachs in his way? We’d never know.
    What I did know was that there would be no vocab jars for Ronan. There was nothing he needed to prove or do or become. He could stay a beautiful acorn; he didn’t need to grow into a tree or realize