This resolve did not come to me immediately. I grew toward it, but once I had reached it I have held to it through all the years of her life. I have let it work in quiet ways, dreading the cold eyes of the curious. Now, today, I will forget those whom I dread, who, after all, are very few. I will remember the many who are kind, who will understand my purpose in telling this story, who will want to help to fulfill this purpose because it is their purpose too.
I am always moved, with grateful wonder, by the goodness of people. For the few who are prying or meanly critical, for the very few who rejoice in the grief of others, there are the thousands who are kind. I have come to believe that the natural human heart is good, and I have observed that this goodness is found in all varieties of people, and that it can and does prevail in spite of other corruptions. This human goodness alone provides hope enough for the world.
I have sometimes wondered, as the years passed, whether the moment would come when I might feel that my purpose for my child must include the telling of her story. I dreaded this, and do dread it. Nevertheless, the time has come. For there is afoot in our country a great new movement to help all children like her. It is too late, of course, for her to be helped, but it is not too late for many little ones, and surely for others yet to be born. For we are beginning to understand the importance and the significance of the mentally retarded person in our human society. Almost one person in every hundred is or will be mentally retarded,1 and of these the majority are retarded from non-inherited causes. The old stigma of “something in the family” is all too often unjust.
The total number of retarded children is not large in proportion to the whole population, and yet it is enough to cause trouble everywhere. Homes are unhappy, parents distraught, schoolrooms confused by the presence of these who for no fault of their own are as they are. As parents die or cannot care for them, as teachers give them up, these children drift helplessly into the world, creating havoc wherever they go. They become the tools of those more clever; they are the hopeless juvenile delinquents; they fall into criminal ways because they know not what they do. And all they do is in innocence, for of God’s many children these are the most innocent.
I rejoice in the dawn of a better understanding of such children, for the public attitude until now has been a sorely mistaken one. Parents have been bewildered and ashamed when their child is backward, when he cannot learn in school, when perhaps he cannot even learn to talk. It has been a misfortune to be hidden. Neighbors whisper that so-and-so’s child is “not right.” The family is taught to try to pretend that poor Harry or Susie is only slow. The shame of the parents infects all the children and sorrow spreads its blight. The child himself, poor little one, feels, though he cannot comprehend, his own inferiority. He lives in surrounding gloom. His mother cannot smile when she looks at him, and his father looks away at the sight of him. In spite of their tender love for him — for the honor of the human heart, it can passionately protect the helpless creature who is its cross — the child understands enough to know that there is something unfortunate about him. His shadow falls before him, wherever he goes.
Now, thank God, the shadow lifts. Wise men and women are beginning to reason that it is only common sense to accept the mentally retarded person as part of the human family, and to educate him in the things he can do, so that he may be happy in himself and useful to society. That this may be done, the primary work of research must progress as it never has. We must somehow discover why it is that so many people do not develop mentally to their full capacity. There must be remediable causes and certainly there are preventable causes. We know, for example, that if a women has German measles in the first three months of pregnancy, her child may be born mentally defective, but we do not know why. We must know why. The Mongoloid child can appear in any family. He is really an unfinished child and is usually a first or last child. We must find out what conditions in the mother cause this child.2 It is not necessary that children be born never to grow to their fullest selves. The windows are opened, at last, upon this dark corner of human life and the light shines upon the children’s faces and into the hearts of their parents.
That my child, therefore, may have some small share in creating this new light, I tell her story. She cannot know what she does, but I who am her mother will do it for her and in her name, that others like her may have the benefits of a fuller knowledge, a better understanding. It will not be easy to tell it all truthfully, but it is of no use to tell it otherwise. Perhaps when it is finished there will be comfort because it is told for a high purpose.
I must go back into the early years of my young womanhood — no, even before that. When I was a little girl myself, not more than seven years old, living in China, I had an awakening of the spirit. Until then I suppose I was the usual selfish creature, thinking of play and of nothing else except having my own way. I had few children to play with and one of my dear friends was a gay young American woman, who lived for a very short time next door to us. She was married, and during the few months she was our neighbor she had a baby girl born to her. It was my first experience of an American baby and of all the tender care that the average American baby gets.
Every morning I was the attendant at the bath. I poured the water and warmed the towel and handed the mother the little garments, one by one. I was allowed a moment of my own, when the fair-haired blue-eyed little baby, smelling sweetly of soap and freshness, was put into my arms. That was the height of the day for me. I can remember even now, even after I have held so many babies in my arms, babies of many colors and races, the joy of that first little one. I might have grieved very much when the transient neighbors went their way, had not my own little sister been born, fortunately, that same spring in the heart of the vast old city on the Yangtze River which was then my home. I busied myself mightily about our own baby. My mother was desperately ill after the birth, and the chief care of the baby fell upon our old Chinese amah and me. I was so happy I did not know how near my mother was to death.
I have begun this story so long ago because I can see now that I loved my child long before she was born. I wanted children of my own, as most woman do, but I think my intense love of life added depth to natural longing. Something certainly I learned from the Chinese, who value children above all else in life. The Chinese love children for their own sakes and beyond. Children mean the continuity of human life, and human life is wonderful and precious. I absorbed the atmosphere in which I was reared.
My child was born in the height of my young womanhood. I was full of strength and vigor and the enjoyment of life. My life lay in places which might seem strange to my fellow Americans but which were not strange to me. My home then was outside a small mud-walled town in North China. From my windows I looked over miles of flat farm land, green with wheat and sorghum in the summer, and in the winter the color of dust. Springtimes were loveliest, for above the young green wheat mirages shimmered. We had neither lakes nor mountains near, but the mirages brought them to us. They hung like fantastic dreams above the horizon. It was difficult to believe that they were not real.
Like every young woman, I had many dreams. There were books that I wanted to write when I had lived enough to know life. Life I had always wanted in plenty and overflowing, and I think, looking back, that I always ran to meet it. Certainly I always wanted children. So when I knew my first child was to be born, one year in the spring, my joy rose to the height of my dreams. I did not know then that there was to be only one. I did not think of such a possibility. Everything had always gone well with me, all my life. I was one of the fortunately born. I took good fortune for granted. I saw my house full of children.