Finally

Earlier today my copy of Roadmap to Holland: How I Found My Way Through My Son's First Two Years with Down Syndrome by Jennifer Graf Groneberg came in the mail. Though I've never met Jennifer in person, I feel like she is an old friend. She convinced me I had something important to communicate, and helped me fine-tune an essay I wrote about losing Seth, which was one of my hardest, most painful and yet most healing exercises to date. I might not have seen it through without her encouragement.

I had gotten on Amazon.com to order her book a handful of times since it came out a couple of months ago, and each time got waylaid by something, some crisis of the moment. Finally last week, I followed through and now I have it in my hands and can't seem to put it down.
I was reading it while the boys played in the sandbox earlier, I sneaked little reads of it during dinner when no one was looking, I read it while everyone else was watching House, MD tonight, and I'll no doubt be reading it long after all the people, big and small, in my house are sleeping tonight.

I'm only a third of the way into it, and already I've been amazed at how much I've felt that Jennifer was inside my head with the way she described some of the feelings she had after Avery's diagnosis of Down syndrome.

About one or two pages into it, I realized I needed to get out a pencil and start marking passages of it that I could go back later and read to Steve because they perfectly, exactly described a scenario that we had encountered at the hospital or a reaction that we had during those early days when we were feeling so raw.

I'm late getting around to it, but I'm so grateful for this book, which is feeling very much like a balm to my soul.