My wife, Donna, was in her sixth month when she miscarried what would have been our fourth child, and I was relieved.
Before we were married we had talked about having five children. Seven, maybe. We wanted a big family.
Our oldest, Bo, was born at the end of my sophomore year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was as healthy as could be, physically and mentally. Our twins, Jack and Mark, were born a little more than two years later, a month after I graduated.
Mark was just like his big bother; Jack, however, was not.
Eighteen months later, after performing a battery of tests, doctors at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill told us that Jack was profoundly retarded. One of them advised us to put him in a state institution, which we did not do.
They also told us –wrongly, it turned out — that our risk of having another mentally handicapped child was one in four. That was a risk we were not willing to take and we put aside our dreams of a large family.
Donna and I were careful to use birth control but she got pregnant anyway, with an intrauterine device [IUD] in place.
That was the only time in my life that I have been truly afraid. I didn’t know if I could keep on keeping on if we had a second mentally handicapped child. I didn’t know if I could man up.
And then we lost our baby and, God help me, I was relieved.
Coming Monday: The Critic [Me]