An Uncomplicated Life by Paul Daugherty Page B

before calling it a night. Refine a few paragraphs in that graduate school thesis. Set the alarm 30 minutes earlier. Be glad about it.
    Kelly is a deep thinker. He’s not good at articulating his thoughts. Jillian gives him a feeling, he says. “Her enthusiasm for life has made me more enthusiastic.”
    When Kelly was in high school, he’d pile into a borrowed car with his guy friends, and head out on weekend nights to commit high school–guy things. Our common drive is shared with three other families. It’s a few hundred yards long. Near its end is a large rock.
    When Jillian knew Kelly was going out, she’d walk downto the rock, sit down and wait for him to leave. Kerry and I watched this scene at least a hundred times:
    Kelly would tell us goodnight for the evening and hop in a friend’s backseat. They’d cruise down our lane, toward the main road. Just a bunch of high school boys, armed with bravado, itched by insecurities that only cool popularity could scratch. Before they reached the end of the driveway, just before the road, we’d see the red brake light. The car would stop.
    Kelly would be awkwardly shoving himself out of what always seemed to be a two-door car. He’d take a few steps, to the rock. He would kiss his little sister on top of her head. We asked him once why he did this and he couldn’t ever actually explain it. He just felt it.
    We never knew what Kelly’s buddies thought about this, or how they felt in the presence of a child with a disability, maybe the first such child they’d ever met. We never asked. We never asked Kelly what caused him to test the cocoon of guy-ness this way. The answer could never be as important as the gesture itself, offered by a teenaged boy deep in the throes of an adolescent’s need to conform and belong.
    Jillian would walk up the drive after that, smiling. “Kelly kissed me,” she’d say.
    Kelly made Jillian laugh, in the scary, hopeful days after she left the hospital, when laughter was a salve. His kiss made her smile.
    We all smiled about that. We also remembered not to forget it.

CHAPTER 7
    The First Angel
    Speak in a loud voice, clearly and without fear.
— JONATHAN SPENCE
    J illian was never our child with a disability; she was simply our child. That’s how we saw it, but it didn’t mean we could make the rest of her world see her the way we did. That required co-conspirators. They had to share our plan for Jillian, which had little room for compromise. They had to come armed with a generous worldview. They had to believe people are only as good as the way they treat each other.
    No one is going to think your child is as wonderful as you think she is. What we wanted was a core of people who would look at Jillian and see potential. We needed like minds with loud voices, speaking clearly and without fear.
    We needed people like Martha Coen-Cummings, Jillian’s speech therapist and first guardian angel. Martha had worked as a speech pathologist for more than a decade when she metthree-year-old Jillian Daugherty. “Marfa” taught with compassion, patience and curiosity. She operated from a base of acceptance. She’d been raised that way.
    Her father grew up in Seoul, South Korea, the son of American missionaries. He met Martha’s mother in Illinois after World War II. The family settled in Highland Park, a well-off, multiethnic suburb on Chicago’s North Shore. Martha was the only child on the block who was born in the United States. She was the only one to speak English exclusively; her friends spoke two or three languages. Her father’s closest friends were Asian. Martha was as proficient with chopsticks as with a fork.
    When Martha visited her friends’ homes, she was forever mindful of the cultural mores. Some asked that she remove her shoes at their front door. Others frowned on expressions of affection; no hugging. In one friend’s house, Martha was careful not to compliment something unless she was prepared to take the object home