An Uncomplicated Life by Paul Daugherty Page A

life.
    That didn’t happen. Kelly’s head emerged first, facedown.He cork-screwed as he left Kerry’s womb, so when he finally arrived, he was looking up at the ceiling. It took him a few minutes to decide he really wanted to be here.
    More than two decades later, Kelly is still inquisitive and curious, wary and contemplative. One toe in the water, nine high and dry. He’s still checking it all out.
    In those first few days after Jillian was born, when we grieved a sad dizziness, we also worried for Kelly. What sort of prologue would all the prenatal introductions provide? Would Kelly love his little sister, or resent her?
    That first day home, we paused from watching Kelly’s indoor Olympics long enough to eat some lunch. As we ate, it got quiet—not a normal condition in a house with two kids under the age of four.
    “What happened?” Kerry asked.
    Kerry’s dad, Sid, had built Jillian a cradle. Hardwood, with what looked like sled runners on the bottom, so the cradle would rock. Jillian lay in it now, sleeping. Kerry and I went to investigate. Where is Kelly?
    He was inside the cradle, curled up beside Jillian, an arm around her waist.
    “That’s when I knew this would not be an ordinary sibling relationship,” Kerry said.
    Luckily, it was a big cradle, with enough room for a 6-pound baby and her 40-pound brother. They lay face to face, eyes closed, like nesting dolls.
    This is going to work, I thought. This isn’t going to be so bad.
    Kelly started right in with Jillian, helping with her physical therapy. He’d rub the soles of her feet. He’d gently work her arms, up and down and in and out. He’d sit on the floor ofthe family room and roll a ball to her to improve her hand-eye coordination. He did everything with her that Kerry and I did.
    We wanted him to feel needed. It’s a great thing for a three-year-old to be needed. Even at that age, when all that matters to you is what matters to you, Kelly learned that his universe contained other stars. “Without Jillian, I would be an entirely different person,” Kelly said not long ago.
    Less giving, he said. Less understanding, less compassionate. Less aware of peoples’ differences and the possibilities they present. Kelly is fortified with a willingness to look outward. “Jillian pushes me to do what I do,” he said.
    He’s 28 years old now. The quiet, observant child has become a man on the cusp. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he works at a publishing house. As he once noted to me, seriously but without malice, “I don’t want to be a newspaper guy, Dad. I want to be a real writer.” Kelly’s emergence into adulthood has looked a lot like the day he was born.
    He knows things his peers do not. Some of it is innate; Kelly thinks about things. Some came from that six-pound girl, lying next to him in the homemade cradle. Jillian has modeled her behavior after Kelly. Kelly has ordered his life around the lessons Jillian’s life has suggested. Things that make the world move: Patience, tolerance, optimism, kindness.
    When Kelly was in nursery school, he took Jillian to show-and-tell. “This is my little sister. She has Down syndrome.” They’d play for hours in the finished basement. Kelly called it the K and J Club. Jillian’s first word was “Kelly.” Life was never so fast that Kelly couldn’t linger a while for his sister. She was both the tug on his shirt and the push on his aspirations. Shetaught him. This is what I thought. I wondered if he felt the same.

    Jillian, age four, on the beach at St. Simons Island, Georgia.
    He did. He described her as a palm in his back, gently pushing.
    For a family, the extra attention paid to a child with a disability is both a strain and a chance. The hours and frustrations march side by side with the little wins and the big lessons. It’s hard to know where one stops and the other begins.
    Jillian has been the palm in Kelly’s back, gently pushing him to read one more chapter of Faulkner