Poster Child Read Free Page B

Flanagan—population 900—knew about her fast boyfriend from the neighboring town of Streator who went to war; about her long, mysterious vacation to Chicago; about her return to town with a baby boy—my father—nine months later.
    "Oh God, it's my fault," she repeated. She was hysterical. She took the blame for me, for what I was: deformed. There is that tricky line in Exodus she'd memorized as a child, the verse that promises that the sins of the fathers (and mothers) will be visited upon their sons and, in this case, their daughters. Here I was, a condemnation of her life, when all of her life she had been searching for the status and respectability that being a grandmother might restore. My older brother's birth two years before must have felt like a dream come true, a success. Now here I was, the revisitation of an earlier, irrevocable mistake. It's my fault. A statement with a whole lifetime in it: a christening of shame.
    As Grandma cried, Dad stayed silent. Mom looked at him. The room was full of unasked and unanswered questions: Will she live with us forever? Will she die young? Will she walk, run, skip, play, read, and write? What will she be? When she speaks, what will she tell us, what will she say? And also the other questions that would never be answered: Why us? Why her? The air conditioner rattled in the window.
    Still waiting for the official diagnosis, Mom was taken to a private room for my first feeding; the nurse thought there might be trouble. Mom couldn't imagine how a short leg would affect my ability to breast-feed, but she was too tired and overwhelmed to argue.
    "I don't understand how this could happen to you," the nurse said as Mom opened her gown to feed me. The nurse addressed Dad, who was wearing his white clerical collar tucked inside his black cotton clergy shirt. "You two must live closer to God than anyone else." Blame again: To whom or what does it belong?
    The nurse gave Mom a look she would get used to. Later, I would also come to know it well: a look of pity, sadness, with kindness and a bit of unexplainable triumph mixed in. A strangely open yet mysterious look—penetrating and diffuse. "We just don't know what God is going to do," said the nurse, fluffing the pillows as Mom shifted away from her. "We just don't know His plan. Isn't that right, Reverend?"
    Dad stared at the nurse, fuming, until she looked away.
    "I wanted to smack that nurse for her messed-up theology," Mom once told me. "She might have been trying to be helpful. Anyway, I said nothing. You ate and we did fine."
    The next day, a woman my mother had never met before walked into her hospital room and said, "I hear you have a baby with a birth defect."
    Mom watched this stranger move crisply about the room, rolling up the window blinds and filling the water glass by the bed. The woman told the story of her son, who was born with a brain disorder; she explained his functional and cognitive problems and her struggles as a parent. Mom realized that news of my deformity had been spread around the maternity ward; she knew this extreme breach of patient confidentiality was unethical and unprofessional. Too angry to speak, she refused to answer the woman's questions or respond to her expressions of concern. She had been sent in like a messenger of disaster. "If I'd had the energy," Mom said, "I would have sued that hospital's ass."
    I was finally diagnosed with proximal focal femoral deficiency (PFFD), a congenital bone-and-tissue disorder that caused my left femur to develop abnormally in the womb and left it irrevocably damaged. The left leg would always be shorter, deficient. There would be asymmetry in the growth pattern of the limbs; the body would continue to grow unevenly, maintaining its strange, incorrect shape as if it had intended to look that way all along. There might be hip, joint, kidney, and back problems. The problem now had a name: What was the solution?
    After Dr. Baxter explained the diagnosis to the best