Through parenting a child with a disability, a father discovers patience, acceptance, and unconditional love. In 1987, Paul Austin and his wife Sally were newlyweds, excited about their future together and happily anticipating the birth of their first child. He was a medical student and she was a nurse. Everything changed the moment the doctor rushed their infant daughter from the room just after her birth, knowing instantly that something was wrong. Sarah had almond-shaped eyes, a single crease across her palm instead of three, and low-set ears—all of which suggested that the baby had Down syndrome. Beginning on the day Sarah is born and ending when she is a young adult living in a group home, Beautiful Eyes is the story of a father's journey toward acceptance of a child who is different. In a voice that is unflinchingly honest and unerringly compassionate, Austin chronicles his life with his daughter: watching her learn to walk and talk and form her own opinions, making decisions about her future, and navigating cultural assumptions and prejudices—all the while confronting, with poignancy and moving candor, his own limitations as her father. It is Sarah herself, who, in her own coming of age and her own reconciling with her difference, teaches her father to understand her. Time and again, she surprises him: performing Lady Gaga’s "Poker Face" at a talent show; explaining how the word "retarded" is hurtful; reacting to the events of her life with a mixture of love, pain, and humor; and insisting on her own humanity in a world that questions it. As Sarah begins to blossom into herself, her father learns to look past his daughter’s disability and see her as the spirited, warmhearted, and uniquely wise person she is.

Everyone who writes a novel, a poem, or a memoir almost certainly conducts research along the waywhether to develop a story idea, or to capture the voice, the speech patterns, or the exact words of a character, or to ensure authenticity or accuracy of detail in describing a person, a place, an object, a setting. This kind of experiential research is an art form of its own, and this book is the first to treat it as such. Addressing writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, Philip Gerard covers all the different kinds of archives that might inform creative work, including historical documents, site visits, interviews, and memory. He offers practical tips for drawing on these different types of sources, including such mundane matters as planning and budgeting for travel costs, arranging access in advance, and troubleshooting when plans go awry. And he illustrates how the insights gleaned from research can be incorporated into stories, poems, and nonfiction using examples from a wide range of writers."

Climbing the Broken Judicial Ladder continues the author’s journey of exploring the heartbreak and loss of first adopting Cordelia with severe reactive attachment disorder (RAD) in Washington state and then of nearly losing her to the draconian and confused child welfare legal complex in Los Angeles. In this third volume of his Denied! Failing Cordelia trilogy, Cambridge climbs the broken California judicial ladder from the California Court of Appeals (Second Appellate District) based in Los Angeles to the California Supreme Court. Cambridge concludes that in appeals relating to dependency cases, the ladder is broken for parents seeking to advocate for themselves and for the true best interests of their children. Policies relating to child welfare are flawed, Cambridge argues, because of the preemptive and prejudicial response to the issues raised during the detention of children. As with his two earlier books, Cambridge explores issues connected with how best to parent his adopted daughter and advocate for her needs in the context of a dependency case. Cordelia’s reactive attachment disorder would surface throughout the judicial struggle as would the author’s own struggles with Asperger syndrome. Each would feed negatively into the overall trauma and drama of the author’s unrelenting quest to reunite his “forever family.” Cambridge believes that dependency proceedings are ill-equipped on many levels to elicit a proper understanding of RAD or of the therapeutic parenting needed to address it. Cambridge believes that adoptive parents of children with special needs need to be understood by more sympathetic social workers and by therapists trained in attachment disorders. Cambridge’s persistent efforts to reunite his “forever family” would leave him increasingly isolated as he climbs the judicial ladder. Based on his experiences, Cambridge explores areas for reform in Los Angeles dependency proceedings and evokes Shakespeare’s King Lear by arguing that social workers need to “see better” and that the Los Angeles Juvenile Dependency Court needs to encourage a broader understanding of the issues raised through more effective legal advocacy from assigned dependency lawyers. Cambridge argues that parents should be allowed to address the court directly. Cambridge also relates how he and his daughter have found many positive and healthy ways to heal in the years since their dependency case ended. Much trauma could have been avoided if those around them had “seen better” and had recognized the value in their dramatic and loving adoption journey.

This vivid portrait of contemporary parenting blends memoir and cultural analysis to explore evolving ideas of disability and human difference. An Ordinary Future is a deeply moving work that weaves an account of Margaret Mead's path to disability rights activism with one anthropologist's experience as the parent of a child with Down syndrome. With this book, Thomas W. Pearson confronts the dominant ideas, disturbing contradictions, and dramatic transformations that have shaped our perspectives on disability over the last century. Pearson examines his family's story through the lens of Mead's evolving relationship to disability—a topic once so stigmatized that she advised Erik Erikson to institutionalize his son, born with Down syndrome in 1944. Over the course of her career, Mead would become an advocate for disability rights and call on anthropology to embrace a wider understanding of humanity that values diverse bodies and minds. Powerful and personal, An Ordinary Future reveals why this call is still relevant in the ongoing fight for disability justice and inclusion, while shedding light on the history of Down syndrome and how we raise children born different.

Nominated for the Foundation of Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2018 In the UK and beyond, Down’s syndrome screening has become a universal programme in prenatal care. But why does screening persist, particularly in light of research that highlights pregnant women’s ambivalent and problematic experiences with it? Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Thomas explores how and why we are so invested in this practice and what effects this has on those involved. Informed by theoretical approaches that privilege the mundane and micro practices, discourses, materials, and rituals of everyday life, Down’s Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics describes the banal world of the clinic and, in particular, the professionals contained within it who are responsible for delivering this programme. In so doing, it illustrates how Down’s syndrome screening is ‘downgraded’ and subsequently stabilised as a ‘routine’ part of a pregnancy. Further, the book captures how this routinisation is deepened by a systematic, but subtle, framing of Down’s syndrome as a negative pregnancy outcome. By unpacking the complex relationships between professionals, parents, technology, policy, and clinical practice, Thomas identifies how and why screening is successfully routinised and how it is embroiled in both new and familiar debates surrounding pregnancy, ethics, choice, diagnosis, care, disability, and parenthood. The book will appeal to academics, students, and professionals interested in medical sociology, medical anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), bioethics, genetics, and/or disability studies.

Spend a weekend with three middle-aged siblings--Rob, Ed, and Alana--as they get to know their parents and themselves. War hero Lou Lucky Jaggers is dead. He and his widow, Jolene, had secrets theyd kept from everyone but each other. Now the secrets come out and will forever change their childrens lives. They just might change yours, too. MY FATHERS EYES is the story of our time.

The Cosmos is merging at a stellar speed; constantly expanding and evolving, are we here, and no one else; are there forces at work we know nothing about? Humanity, has been surrounded by a radiant celestial, ecological, physiological and psychological, emersion into a final flawless reality. Life on Earth has been of the most profound society to evolve into universal wisdom, with perfect consciousness as the cosmos and the hereafter merge into our dimension. Humanity...just a decade after an era of a psychic awakening that rocked our axis, and has created a “Concrete Paradise” a civilization on one planet in complete unison, once again, we are on the threshold of yet another consciousness. We are not at all who we think we are. It is in the middle of fall in the picturesque utopia in what had been known as the east coast of the United States. The world is in a complete state of equanimity, the cycle of life goes on.