How do you quantify the unquantifiable, and reduce the unexplainable to a rational equation?
Martha Beck is Harvard-educated, brilliant, and married to an equally Harvard- educated and brilliant man. At the outset Expecting Adam, neither Martha nor her husband are religious, although both were raised as Mormons. They had agreed that "it was a very good idea to abort fetuses with birth defects." But when Martha becomes pregnant with a Down's Syndrome baby, whom she names Adam, she's not so sure about things. It doesn't help that her entire world has been turned upside-down with inexplicable events and miracles large and small since Adam's conception.
Precisely because Beck refuses to be pigeon-holed by either right or left, Expecting Adam continually turned me on my head while I was reading it. Beck can write (when describing her complete lethargy and weakness at one point in time, she compares herself to "Popeye during the Great Spinach Shortage"). Simple statement. I enjoy, I tremendously enjoy, reading the work of people who can write. Beck is witty, sharp, and sarcastic. When she experiences any negative or shallow reaction to Adam's existence in this world, she roars with all of the fury of a mother bear. Yet she makes it abundantly clear that it is Adam who has taught her what life really consists in: the ability to slow down and enjoy the world, not to be caught up in what society classifies as the necessities of life, to truly appreciate the wonder of this mad existence that we lead.
Beck writes quite frankly about Adam's existence as a person before his birth. Neither she nor her husband deny the humanity of the unborn. This, coupled with all of the incredible things that happen to her during her pregnancy beg the question -- why hadn't she become "pro-life" by the time of Adam's birth? She admits that she's come to believe in the existence of the spiritual realm (it's hard not to when someone pushes you out of a burning building and a picture shows absolutely no one behind you), whether it's God, angels, cosmic puppeteers or invisible gremlins. She does offer the explanation that "I myself had suspended my disbelief in a spiritual realm and was stumbling daily over more and more evidence that my world was full of things rationalist science could not explain. But this made me feel better, not worse, about the fate of those who die young, including those who die as fetuses. Why should people who believe that life exists outside of mortal bounds be the very same people who are so obsessed with a fetus's 'right to life' on this messy little planet?"
It is because Beck remains an "outsider" of the pro-life movement, that her memoir resonated with me in a way that similar stories, told by wonderful and fervent pro-lifers, have not. I am not accusing these people of propaganda (on the contrary, I agree with them on nearly every count), but because Beck remains as mystified at the end as at the beginning of her story as to why exactly she kept Adam in the first place, her words carry a raw honesty that is often lost in the charged rhetoric of the abortion/pro-life debate.
Beck's story provided me with much fodder for thought, but ultimately the lessons she learned from Adam touched me the most deeply. One thing that I've come to learn over this past summer is the importance of appreciating the wonder of life, and all the beauty and miraculousness that God has placed here for us. Beck does not hesitate to admit that her own obsession with achievements and the perfect life were entirely upended by Adam.
"I was afraid Adam would slow me down, and he has. Not because he has required more care and time than a "normal boy" (he is the most helpful and least demanding of my children) but because the immediacy and joy with which he lives his life make rapacious achievement, Harvard-style, look a lot like quiet desperation. Adam has slowed me down to the point where I notice what is in front of me, its mystery and beauty, instead of thrashing my way through a maze of difficult requirements toward labels and achievements that contain no joy in themselves. Adam takes his joy straight up, in purer form than most of us can handle. He was the person who, at two years of age, spent enough time experimenting to learn that his four-month-old sister was capable of laughter, and determining exactly what would make her laugh. He is the one who goes into transports of delight over clean sheets, or packaged waffles, or batteries. He is the one who taught me to appreciate rainbows -- not only in the sky but also in lawn sprinklers and dish-soap bubbles and patches of oil. He is the one who stops, and makes me stop, to smell the bushes."
(caveat emptor: Beck is extremely frank about her views on abortion and contraception, almost to point of rubbing the reader's face in them. She also swears on occasion, but I found it to be understandable, if not excusable. There are also some slightly, but not horrifically, graphic descriptions of various medical complications from her pregnancy.)
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