Perfectly Human: Nine Months with Cerian - Softcover

Williams, Sarah C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874866693 ISBN 13: 9780874866698

Verlag: Plough Publishing House, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

She knew they would only have a few fleeting months together, but in that time Sarah’s unborn daughter would transform her understanding of beauty, worth, and the gift of life.

Happily married and teaching history at the University of Oxford, Sarah Williams had credentials, success, and knowledge. It took someone who would never have any of these things to teach her what it means to be human.

This extraordinary true story begins with the welcome news of a new member of the Williams family. Sarah’s husband, Paul, and their two young daughters share her excitement. But the happiness is short-lived, as a hospital scan reveals a lethal skeletal dysplasia. Birth will be fatal.

Sarah and Paul decide to carry the baby to term, a decision that shocks medical staff and Sarah’s professional colleagues. Sarah and Paul find themselves having to defend their child’s dignity and worth against incomprehension and at times open hostility. They name their daughter, Cerian, Welsh for “loved one.” Sarah writes, “Cerian is not a strong religious principle or a rule that compels me to make hard and fast ethical decisions. She is a beautiful person who is teaching me to love the vulnerable, treasure the unlovely, and face fear with dignity and hope.”

In this candid and vulnerable account, Sarah brings the reader along with her on the journey towards Cerian's birthday and her deathday. It’s rare enough to find a writer who can share such a heart-stretching personal experience without sounding sappy, but here is one who at the same time has the ability to articulate the broader cultural issues raised by Cerian’s story. In a society striving for perfection, where worth is earned, identity is constructed, children are a choice, normal is beautiful, and deformity is repulsive, Cerian’s short life raises vital questions about what we value and where we are headed as a culture.

Perfectly Human was first published in the United Kingdom as The Shaming of the Strong. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah C. Williams trained as an historian at the University of Oxford, where she subsequently taught British and European political and cultural history. After seventeen years at Oxford, in 2005 she moved with her family to Vancouver, Canada, where she taught history at Regent College. Today Williams lives with her husband Paul in the Cotswolds, close to the city of Oxford, where she continues her research, writing, and teaching. The daughter of popular British author Jennifer Rees Larcombe, Williams is the author of Perfectly Human, a spiritual autobiography in which she reflects on contemporary debates surrounding identity and personhood.

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Perfectly Human

Nine Months with Cerian

By Sarah C. Williams

Plough Publishing House

Copyright © 2018 Plough Publishing House
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87486-669-8

Contents

1 The Day of Trouble, 1, 
2 Pineapples and Amethysts, 7, 
3 A Question, 16, 
4 Sanity, 21, 
5 Sticky Buns, 27, 
6 Two Big Roads, 33, 
7 "Suboptimal Life", 38, 
8 Loved One, 47, 
9 The Tape Recorder, 50, 
10 Awkward Questions, 55, 
11 The Labor Bag, 62, 
12 An Angel in Yorkshire, 66, 
13 The Cerian Summer, 75, 
14 Thai Green Curry, 83, 
15 Cold Tea, 86, 
16 The Garrison, 94, 
17 Horse and Rider, 98, 
18 A Rubber Band, 104, 
19 Flight of the Skylark, 108, 
20 A Whole Lifetime Over, 112, 
21 The Seagulls' Cry, 116, 
22 No Morning in Heaven, 122, 
23 Married and Male, 128, 
24 The Shaming of the Strong, 134, 
25 The Bird Tree, 142, 
Epilogue, 146, 

CHAPTER 1

The Day of Trouble

There are two entrances to the Women's Center at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. We took the top one. I glanced at my watch as we entered the lobby. My calculations had been precise. I had ten minutes to spare before my routine twenty-week ultrasound scan in the Prenatal Diagnosis Unit. I had dropped the children at school, driven to the supermarket to do the week's shopping, rushed home, crammed the food into the cupboards and begun preparations for Hannah's birthday party later that afternoon. All day I had been reminiscing about the birth of our eldest exactly eight years before. Hannah was born in Canada on Vancouver's North Shore in a room that overlooked the white-capped mountains of Grouse and Seymour. I remembered the mountains as I struggled to purchase my parking ticket.

My neighbor was on the seventh floor of the John Radcliffe, having given birth to her third baby thirty-six hours earlier. I headed straight for the lift, abandoning my mother in the lobby. I found Adrienne was sitting up in bed like a queen, radiant with the relief and joy of her son's arrival. I held him in my arms and realized with a surge of excitement that this would soon be me. I laughed out loud as I headed back to the ground floor. Next time I visited the seventh floor I would have my baby with me.

The waiting room was surprisingly full for a Monday afternoon. My mother set up her laptop to catch up on some work. Paul would have done the same if he had been here, instead of in a client meeting in London. He and I had never been sentimental about ultrasounds. The first time we had seen Hannah on the screen in the Lion's Gate Hospital in Vancouver, we both reacted to the bizarre unreality of seeing our child for the first time through the intrusive medium of technology. Our friends told us this would be the moment of bonding, but we had struggled to tell the difference between a head and a foot, our eyes flitting back and forth between graphs and cursors. The image on the screen bore little relation to the clear mental picture we had of our child. We vowed never to have another ultrasound scan and we discussed the ethics of prenatal screening all the way home in our clapped-out Dodge Omni. Such conversations came naturally to us during our student days.

Perhaps I was mellowing with age or maybe the exhaustion of two small children had taken the edge off my idealism; either way I could barely read the magazine in front of me I was so excited to see our baby by whatever means.

The doctor called my name and I got up to follow him. He asked my mother to join us. Not wishing to overstep any grandmotherly boundaries, she was reluctant at first, but sharing my enthusiasm she did not take much persuasion.

It was dark in the room and I remember the dull pattern on the curtain around the bed and the sharp cold of the jelly as the doctor squeezed it onto my bump. I made a joke about twins.

And then I saw the foot. There were no shifting lines this time; even the toes were distinct. The baby seemed for an instant to look straight at me. I could see the detail of the face. I caught my breath, silenced by a sudden rush of love and connection. I now knew what those friends meant by bonding. With Hannah it happened when I saw the bright blue line on the home pregnancy test, and with Emilia when I first held her in my arms after an arduous labor. I smiled at myself, unashamedly sentimental laying there oozing love at the screen.

"It makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?" my mother said, reflecting my own thoughts and referring to the acute nausea that had dominated the pregnancy up until this point.

But the doctor's cheery voice gave way to a clipped monotone. He left the room and returned with a female technician. I assumed he was simply inexperienced at doing ultrasounds, and I shuffled into a sitting position and looked at my watch. I'd seen everything I wanted to see and it was time to get home to prepare the party. I bristled with irritation as the woman redid everything the doctor had done. If we didn't leave soon, there would be no time for Paul to play an extended game with the girls as planned, and to read an extra chapter of Narnia before bed.

The woman put her hand on my arm and said the words that every expectant mother hopes she will never hear: "I am so sorry. There is something wrong with the baby. We need to fetch the consultant."

"But there can't be," I responded immediately. "I saw the face. The baby looks fine to me."

She shook her head and squeezed my arm.

I went cold all over. The rational part of my brain observed this creeping paralysis from a distance with a strange forensic clarity. How could this be? God knew I could not bear this, not after all I'd been through.

"Mum, I'm terrified." I whispered.

"I'm going to pray." The edge in my mother's voice suggested she was no less afraid than I was, but the discipline of years had made prayer reflexive.

I was so glad she was there. She hadn't planned to come to the hospital with me. I'd told her I was quite content to have some time alone, but she'd run after me as I shut the front door. "Hang my emails! Let's make a jaunt of it. I'll drive so you can relax and get your energies up for the birthday party."

I heard footsteps in the corridor and the lowered tones of serious discussion. Somehow I had to pull my mind into gear to ask all the right questions – the questions Paul would have asked had he been there.

The consultant sat down beside me. He checked the notes before he spoke – evidently, my name had not featured in the relay of information behind the door. A number of people stood behind him peering over his shoulder at the screen. Using the cursor and his finger for reinforcement, he highlighted different points of the tiny person inside me and murmured incomprehensible numbers at the group.

"I have to tell you, Mrs. Williams, this baby will not live. It has thanatophoric dysplasia, a lethal skeletal deformity that will certainly result in death shortly after birth. The chest is too small to sustain the proper development of the lungs. When the baby is born it will not be able to breathe."

I concentrated on the medical terms, repeating thanatophoric dysplasia over and over again under my breath. I wanted him to stop speaking but I was too afraid of forgetting the words. I shouted at him in my head: "This can't be true. You must be mistaken. You've muddled my body up with someone else. This is not my baby. It must be a fault on the screen."

But the consultant left no room for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Plough Publishing House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0874866693
• ISBN 13: 9780874866698
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Plough; https://www.plough.com/en/; ; 101 WOODCREST DRIVE; RIFTON; NY; 12471; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar