Seen through loving eyes

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My granddaughter Lucy is 6 years old and is part of a class of people that is quietly being eliminated in my country. She has Down syndrome, a genetic condition that frightens so many women that 92 percent of those who learn they are carrying babies with it choose to abort.

Dr. Brian Skotko, a genetics fellow at Children's Hospital, fears this number will rise. Prenatal tests are invasive, carry a risk to the fetus, and are given in the second trimester, so many women choose not to have them. But a simple new and non-invasive blood test, to be given early in a woman's pregnancy, is coming, perhaps as early as next year.

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A 4-year-old ambassador against fear

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A 4-year-old ambassador against fear

This is what "internationally renowned" Sherman J. Silber, M.D., writes in his "completely revised and updated" book "How to Get Pregnant," published by Little Brown and Co. last August: "The biggest fear of most pregnant women is that their child will be abnormal, and the most common abnormality they worry about is Down syndrome. ... These children are severely retarded mentally, and they usually die before their thirtieth birthday." He also writes: "We can prevent couples from having to face the horror of giving birth to children with otherwise devastating genetic defects such as Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, mental retardation, etc., that terrify every woman who ever gets pregnant."

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What parents can't control

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What parents can't control

t's eight in the morning and my husband and I are talking about laying stones around the periphery of the garden, big stones, more boulder than brick, in an effort to keep the dirt in and the rabbits out. It's a sensible plan, except for my worry about the little kids who cut through the garden and race down its slope. "Maybe stones are a bad idea," I say to my husband. "What if the kids fall?" "Maybe living near a street is a bad idea," he says, meaning you can't protect children from everything…

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FEARING THE BAD WHEN LIFE IS GOOD

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FEARING THE BAD WHEN LIFE IS GOOD

You try to teach them the eternals, that life is good, and people are kind, and nothing is so bad that you can't get through it. And most days you believe this. But then you replay history, or you watch the news, or you pick up a paper and see the face of yet another person maimed, killed, robbed, blown up, beaten, kidnapped, raped, sick and dying, and you think you're selling your kids a pack of lies.

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WE'RE HOPING ALL OUR FEARS ARE WRONG

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WE'RE HOPING ALL OUR FEARS ARE WRONG

I am on the phone with Rosemary, my best friend since second grade. I used to talk to her on the old black phone in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. And she used to talk to me on the old black phone that sat on a table to the left of her front door.

"Want to come over?"

"I'll ask my mother."

Fifty-two years. At least a million conversations. This one is hard. They've all been hard since her son, Mark, left for Iraq.

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The war is one endless night

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The war is one endless night

Middle of the night is the worst. I wake now at 3 a.m., and hear the silence and think instantly about the noise on the other side of the world, and how lucky I am to be in my house, in my bed, safe. And how grateful I am that my son isn't over there. Or my daughters. These are my first thoughts. Then I think about other people's children, the faces I see in the paper and on TV - kids still - under all that protective gear, in harm's way, fighting an enemy no one understands.

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Everyday life must triumph over terror

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Everyday life must triumph over terror

Before, on a September Sunday, I would be looking at the world in all its beauty and thinking that it's going too fast - the month, the fall, the leaves turning, every day getting shorter than the one before. I would ache to slow it down and be sad when I couldn't. September is always a bittersweet time. Before, on a September Sunday, I would drive to church and see pumpkins for sale at Cassie's and I would think, I have to stop on the way home and get some. And I would pass a nursery full of mums, and think, I need to get mums, too, and cornstalks and hay for the wheelbarrow. And I need to repaint the wheelbarrow.

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Kids know 'The Look' is still around

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I thought THE LOOK had gone the way of penny candy and flavor straws. "What look?" I expected people to say when I asked about it. But instead there was all this nodding and smiling and instant recognition. "Oh, I know THE LOOK" and "No one could give THE LOOK like my mother." And "You know what? My mother still gives me THE LOOK."

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One more day to live in the sun

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One more day to live in the sun

Five weeks after she had her second leg amputated the doctors sent her home with health aides coming in just a few hours a day. I was terrified for her and for me. How could this 85-year-old woman live without constant help? How would she get from the bed to the wheelchair, from the wheelchair to the bathroom? How could she maneuver the wheelchair through an opening so small that I had trouble when I pushed the chair? Where would she get the strength and the patience to perform such a task?

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Remembering the tough times

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It's 10 days after the operation and everything is getting back to normal. The hole that opened in the earth has closed, and falling into it is almost - though not quite - a memory. All's well that ends well is what we say, what we repeat, what we believe. My husband is home. He is healing. Life, as we've known it, returns a little more each day to the way it was, to the way we want it to be. That's the goal, getting back to normal, putting the operation behind…

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After the mammogram comes the fear

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Two years ago, it looked like a rich grandparent's parlor. The carpet was thick, the upholstered couches and chairs, elegant. Everything matched: furniture, drapes, end tables, lamps. The room evoked a sense of calm and comfort.

And yet it was all pretense, mental Valium, because the Sagoff Center at Faulkner Hospital was never a parlor. It is, and always was, a waiting area for women who've come for mammograms. A door opens and on the other side of a designer wall women sit in thin, cotton hospital robes on hard, armless chairs, waiting to be X-rayed and told they can go back into the land of the living - at least for a while.

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Things that go bump in the night - or crinkle and crunch

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Things that go bump in the night - or crinkle and crunch

I can hear it clearly, very clearly, a kind of crinkling, crunching like cellophane or a taffeta dress being eagerly devoured. The sound is coming from the bedroom. I get up and turn on the air conditioner and the radio. I cover up the noise with other noise. I don't want to go into the bedroom. I don’t want to look under the bed or behind the bureau.

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Nuke test return will poison earth

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Tuesday, June 8: I am at my computer moving words around a screen, but not seeing them. My mind is fixed on three people I know, at three different hospitals, all seeing doctors, all undergoing tests and procedures, all doing battle with cancer.

Caryn is having a check-up. She's examined every six months now. Three and a half years ago she found a lump, was diagnosed, had surgery and months of radiation and chemotherapy.

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Safe streets everybody's fight

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It wasn't fear this night. It was more subtle.

It was dark and late and I didn't know the neighborhood. I was in Providence. What did I know about Providence? The walk from the theater to the parking lot was just two blocks, but who knew what lurked on those blocks?

So I asked someone to walk me to my car. I felt foolish making the request. And yet, I wouldn't have walked alone.

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Fisher Price people don't kill kids; guns do

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Usually I read these things and take them for what they are: a warning that once I would have memorized, but that now I just peruse. I don't have little kids anymore. I don't need to worry about toy safety.

But the story was about Fisher Price's Little People and though it has been years since I picked up the cow and put him back in his barn, and arranged the plastic children in their swings, I finished the article because of all the toys my children had, Fisher Price Little People were my favorite. Even the words on a printed page evoke nostalgia.

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