Do you ever look back at an apparently random occurrence and marvel at the chain of events it set in motion?

Joseph, the boy in What About the Boy, came into this world, at least in part, because of a stranger’s child.

Judy and I were strolling through the park one pretty Sunday afternoon, way back in 1984, and I just happened to notice a little girl in a bright sunsuit, toddling in the grass around a blanket upon which her parents lazed.

Gee, I thought. That looks nice. Hmmmm.

Until then, neither of us had seriously entertained the notion of having kids. We were in our thirties, but I don’t know—we probably felt that we were still not too far removed from being kids ourselves. We’d stayed preoccupied with careers and deciding where we wanted to live. So a few minutes later, as we sat on a low stone wall beside the bay, Judy couldn’t believe it when I tossed out the suggestion that we make someone new.

“Really? Are you sure that’s what you want?” She looked almost frightened. Oh, she warmed to the idea quickly enough, but while wrestling with it in those first few moments, she blurted a warning that turned out to be prophetic. “If we ever split up,” she said, “this will be your kid.”

We never talked about splitting up. I don’t know why she said that, other than as a test of my commitment.

Turns out we both had plenty of commitment.

* * *

Skipping ahead a few years, another stranger’s youngster crossed our path and set a new chain of events into motion. This time, Judy was standing at a counter at Joseph’s doctor’s office, writing a check, when a child rolled onto her foot. Looking down, she recognized disability in an Asian skin. As Joseph had been until recently, this kid was saddled with a problem that prevented him from crawling or doing much of anything.

A conversation ensued with the mother, who was an immigrant from Taiwan. When they learned that we’d helped our son overcome a problem similar to the one they faced, both parents wanted to meet us. Before long, we were very close, and when they returned to Taiwan, they wanted us to visit them there. Until then, neither of us had entertained the idea of traveling to Asia at all. We knew virtually nothing about that side of the world.

Well, we went. And I absolutely loved Taiwan, and everything I could see about Chinese culture, but let’s save that story for another day.

* * *

All human relationships end sooner or later, and one day Judy and I did split up. Cancer took her. Let’s save that for another day, too. (All this is in the book, by the way.) But because the little girl in the park prompted a decision to have a child of our own, and because in turn our boy broadened our horizons sufficiently, one day I found myself traveling solo in mainland China, relying on a recently acquired and very imperfect command of Mandarin. That’s where I met Song Yi, who later became Joseph’s stepmother, and who then blessed Joseph with two charming siblings.

Nobody could have planned out a story like this. And I’ll bet you’re thinking of similar astonishing chains of events. Want to share?

When I took a personal writing course from Tom Larson a few years ago, I learned that memoir focuses on a single phase of the author’s life (as opposed to, say, autobiography, which starts with the author’s birth and hits all the highlights from there on). Memoir, as it’s conceived these days (or as Tom presented it anyway, and he should know), involves reflection about how just one piece of life has changed the writer.

Reflection and change are the key words.

Memoirists examine their selected piece of life and in the process come to conclusions about the significance of past relationships, or trials they’ve faced, or the effect on them of involvement with certain ideas.

The earliest memoirs I recall reading were not like this. They gave the inside scoop on important, well-known events from the point of view of the principal actors. Examples are The Double Helix, by James Watson, and One Life, by Christiaan Bernard. (Hm, this kind of fare suggests that I must’ve had a fascination with medical science long before the events in my own story.)

Some memoirs today have the same rationale (Let’s Roll!, by Lisa Beamer comes to mind). But the recent excitement about the genre concerns something different. Nowadays we have “literary memoirs,” in which mostly unknown people, who have no connection with ground-breaking discoveries or newsworthy events, explore their specific situations in a way that sheds light on a more universal story. In these books, the subject tends to be an intense emotional—perhaps a very personal—experience. Because of that, even though the writer may have emerged from the experience by the time he begins setting it down on paper, the result is not the sort of thing he can plan out in advance, because the process of working through all the emotions involved can lead to unexpected conclusions.

There is conflict between what I the writer knew then, when I was doing it, vs what I know now. Apparently, it’s not at all unusual for the memoirist looking back to perceive that what he once took for truth was a pack of lies.

That’s the story behind What About the Boy?. My memoir began as little more than private journaling–just recording the facts as they occurred. At that stage, I gave little or no thought to publication. The writing was just an emotional outlet. Later, I thought I might have the makings of a kind of how-to book. This is how we rescued our kid. If your kid has problems, you can do it, too. Well, that idea came and went, but as I dealt with the tail-end of that idea, I realized that what I really had was an emotional journey that ultimately concerned where one turns when one must go somewhere but has no reliable guidance.

Writing often veers off in an unplanned direction, doesn’t it? I sat down here today intending to discuss some of my favorite memoirs, and instead I’ve said what makes memoirs in general interesting. But I would still like to offer a few excellent examples, before becoming totally fixated on promoting my own. Here are three that fit the definition, despite being pretty far apart in subject matter. Please click the links to read the reactions I (and others) have posted on them.

• Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China, by Xiao Di Zhu
• This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, by Vicki Forman
• Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia, by Mark Salzman

What memoirs have you enjoyed?

I’m fascinated by this continuing and accelerating erosion of the control that traditional gatekeepers have held over our lives. Lots of observers, with various different axes to grind, continue to write about this.

Some note that automation, in the form of interactive websites and self-service gas stations and cash registers, is adding to unemployment. Or, at least, it’s eliminating jobs that don’t add value to what others have created.

Some point to the ways in which amateur online journalists are now providing a reality check on big media, and myriad other small operators are using technology to overtake the complacent Goliaths in our world.

This trend has casualties, but I think it’s empowering.

One example: When the time arrived for me to show What About the Boy? to the publishing realm, I found myself repeatedly bumping up against literary agents and acquisitions editors who claimed to see merit in my story but feared to get behind it. Some admitted to being unable to proceed simply because my name is not a household word. The book exists anyway because I realized I didn’t need them. 

“No one is going to pick you,” Seth Godin points out. But that’s OK, since nowadays you can “pick yourself.”

In short, power is shifting from big organizations to small, informal groups and individuals.

If you are a parent with concerns about your kid, which nobody is adequately addressing, this trend is especially good.

I think the ultimate appeal of What About the Boy? is its presumption that individuals have the right, and the power, to make decisions for themselves, as opposed to letting authority figures hand them a circumscribed menu of choices.

Now, this comes with the understanding that we may not always make good choices. (By the same token, my ability to publish this book does not automatically mean I can do it well or deliver a quality product.) Eliminating gatekeepers does not guarantee success. On the other hand, how often do gatekeepers facilitate success? How often are they middle men, at best? At least, when we take responsibility, the choices and the results of those choices are ours. If we care, we will do our very best, and will enlist real help where needed. It’s true that sometimes certain desired outcomes remain out of reach. Nevertheless, choosing our own response to whatever fate sends our way makes us less a victim and more a participant in the way life unfolds.

I see people doing this daily as I monitor online discussions concerning developmental disabilities.

A lady reports that her nephew is constantly walking on his toes, and that the parents are taking him to a podiatrist. This triggers a rather well-informed discussion of what toe-walking may indicate and how others have treated the underlying cause.

One parent asks about the merits of homeopathy. Another responds, “Did absolutely nothing for us.“ The first comes back for more details. “How long did you guys try it for?”

Yet another parent complains that her child is expected to wait a full year before the neurologist can see her. I am among those who step in with suggestions, and the collected responses make fascinating reading, both about the smartest way to get in front of a good neurologist and about what to expect.

What About the Boy? describes my family’s quest for help in the days way back before the Internet was available. We took our son to a doctor who acknowledged that he had major problems, but the doctor had absolutely nothing to recommend in terms of treatment.

We insisted, “There’s got to be something we can do for him!”

“Oh, there are programs out there for children like yours,” the doctor said. “But I’m not about to suggest anything. “They’re controversial.”

“How are we supposed to make intelligent decisions if we don’t know our options?” my wife demanded.

“Talk to other parents,” was all the good doctor would suggest. And that hint started us down a very long path.

Sometimes, I think, gatekeepers don’t even want that role. I think the more intelligent ones hate to find themselves in the path of highly motivated seekers en route to an objective. They know, and we know, that if they can’t help us along the way, they’ve got no business being there.

As always, comments are welcome.

Our children are not born to fulfill our lives, or to make right the things that have gone wrong for us. They make their own choices and create their own futures.

This is as it should be.

Parents who fail to grasp that rather obvious point can sometimes do a lot of damage to the young lives they are shaping. For example, I can think of a guy I used to know who lived in emotional pain and had self-destructive behaviors because of his father’s disapproval. (The father’s plan had been for him to attend The Citadel, which he chose not to do.)

I’m wondering, now that final tweaking and wordsmithing of WATB is over, how long it will be before some reader sees the book in those terms. In reading other people’s books, I can be very critical if it appears that an author has neglected to think matters through (just see the one-star reviews I’ve posted on Goodreads). So now the doubts are taking root: Have I adequately justified the campaign to help Joseph? When will readers begin complaining that his mother and I sought to make him into something he was not–and worse, that as a frustrated student of medicine, I was using his untreated condition as an excuse to play doctor?

This is one of the questions specifically tackled over on the FAQs page, and in the book’s epilogue if nowhere else, but the basic facts of the story ought to be sufficient, seems to me. When he was little, Joseph was in great distress on a continuing basis. I don’t think there’s a parent alive who’d be content to leave a kid in the shape he was then. When he finally attained peace within himself, and then, with help, when he slowly began acquiring skills such as the ability to walk, no one we knew at the time suggested that this might somehow be a bad thing. It was pretty evident that he thought the changes were good!

But experience shows that the debate is inevitable. The only unknown is how soon it will be raised, and whether this story can drive it to a new and potentially more constructive plane.

Unfortunately, life with Joseph continues to provide illustrations of why disability is in the interests of no one, least of all the child. This month, Joseph will have a dental appointment. He hates going to the dentist. Yeah, I know, nobody thinks it’s fun to sit in that chair. But Joseph fights it! He fights it with everything he has, and believe me the guy is pretty strong. When he was smaller, I tried to hold him down while the dentist pried his mouth open and dealt with the risk of being bitten. In recent years, they’ve had to bring in an anesthesiologist to fully sedate him. That means he cannot eat for eight hours prior to the event, and he’s an hour or two recovering afterwards. Oh, and it means an extra outlay of about a thousand bucks. Just for routine cleaning and x-rays. Consequently, he doesn’t get dental care as often as the rest of us do, and there are predictable consequences of that.

Dental visits are just one example of why I hate disability. Yes, it’s a continuing burden for me, but that is trivial next to the suffering imposed on my son. I don’t want my son to suffer. When somebody tells me that I’m wrong in seeking to impose something unnatural on him, what I hear does not sound well-meaning. If the question comes up during a reading or an interview, I hope to be able to discuss the matter calmly, in a way that can be understood by the other side. This post is a practice run at that. Feedback is welcome.