I’m home this morning after spending Wednesday until Saturday night on the road for several speaking engagements and book signings in northwest Iowa. I met so many new people in Alta and Storm Lake who were enthusiastic about A Different Dream for My Child.
The highlight of the trip was a book signing held at the Art Center in my hometown on Friday afternoon. The Le Mars Art Center is housed in the former Carnegie Library where a good portion of my childhood was spent. Being back in the place where I first read books by Lois Lenski, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madeleine L’Engle, along with the Cherry Ames, Student Nurse and the entire Young American biographies series, was a real kick.
Old classmates, high school teachers, college professors, neighbors, friends, and relatives stopped to chat. Some stayed for the program when I read from Different Dream and talked about writing it. I mentioned one family featured in the book whose first child was born in Le Mars in the 1960s. The little girl, an anencephalic, was delivered by the town’s beloved “baby doctor.” I shared how his compassion and common sense had touched the family deeply and helped the mother recover from a deep depression.
Afterwards two women, both mothers of my former classmates, told me they had delivered anencephalic babies, too. One child lived a few hours, the other eleven days. Contemporaries of my mother, their eyes filled with tears fifty years after the fact, their voices went quiet, and our hearts connected in shared grief.
Both women were part of my childhood church congregation. Both of them supported and encouraged our family when Dad was sick. Both of them bought copies of Different Dream, and I’m praying it will minister to them as they ministered to me.
Fifty years late, perhaps. But a mother’s heart responds to God’s perfect timing, not clocks and calendars. And I’m praying Friday afternoon was part of God’s schedule, more than an appointment of my making.
Fifty years late, perhaps. And right on time.
