RAISING OWEN

Former journalist Lezotte offers a memoir of how her family’s lives changed after her child’s unexpected diagnosis.

When the author’s infant son, Owen, was 7 days old, doctors told her that he had Down syndrome. She quickly found that she was subtly distancing herself from her child, even in her choice of words when referring to him; for example, she told an old friend, “the baby has Down syndrome” instead of “my baby.” She attempted to transform her thinking, but she found it difficult; she writes that her husband, Erik, celebrated that Owen had “won the prize of life,” but she privately felt that “maybe it would have been better if he had died.” It was a startling and shocking thought, and it led her to change her attitude toward her son: “I knew deep down there was a reserve in me that would rise up to become his greatest ally and his fiercest bodyguard.” Her sister Marie’s comments were convincing: “You know, it’s time you got over it. He’s here. He has Down syndrome. Deal with it.” Later, when Lezotte found that special-education students in a local school were being separated from the rest of the student body, she asked herself what was best for her child while also engaging in self-analysis: “Was fighting for inclusion for me, so I could toot my own horn and be the hero of the story?” The searing honesty of this and other moments in Lezotte’s memoir makes it a worthy read, and it gives the work a feeling of authenticity and transparency. For example, the author writes that she encouraged Owen to attend a high school dance without a date, which paid off when he mingled with a group of fellow single guys; it’s an appealing, genuine scene, and it’s one that, the author writes, galvanized her faith in her son. Although the writing sometimes lacks specificity, such as a sparsely described scene of a dinner in Venice, Italy, the memoir makes up for it with its bravery and frankness.

A candid story of one mother’s rocky parenting journey.