The Other Side of Special

March 13, 2023
In this disorganized outing, Take Heart podcast cohosts Brown, Clime, and Holt probe the challenges of bringing up children with complex medical issues. After the authors met serendipitously in a writing group, they realized that while their children’s diagnoses differed, they shared the “messy emotions” of raising special needs kids—among them the grief over the dream of a healthy child—that can bubble up unexpectedly. They normalize doubt in God when it feels as though “he has forgotten you,” and assure readers that they can find evidence of his providence if they look for it. While certain anecdotes resonate—arriving at yet another event that lacks wheelchair access, for example—the individual authors’ narratives are woven together in each chapter without clear delineation, making chronologies and stories hard to keep track of. As well, they too often frame their struggles with a sermonic tidiness in which the answer tends to be faith, rather than fully exploring hard-to-reconcile emotions like depression. Despite some moments of insight, this is a missed opportunity.