NOT Always Happy: An Unusual Parenting Journey

While most people meet their child for the first time in a delivery room, some parents have to  meet their child in the reception area of an administrative building.

Not Always Happy, Central Recovery Press Trade Paper; May, 2017; $15.95) is a humorous and sharp chronicle about adopting and raising a son with Down Syndrome from the Maine foster care system.  The author quickly learns that life is best lived by expecting the unplanned when she makes the decision to become a parent in her late forties.  As her unconventional family moves along in this life, she and her husband are less aware that they are raising an atypical child or an adopted child.  They are raising their child and their family struggles with the same universal themes that any family goes through.

“[Kari] and her husband and their young son are participants in a movement that promises profound changes in our world’s understanding of people with intellectual disabilities.  They are grappling with something that has long perplexed me - how to get people to stop misunderstanding and mistreating those with intellectual differences.  Not by scolding and shaming them into pity and forced tolerance - though some of the people in this book could use scolding and shaming.  By getting them to see what should be so obvious: our shared humanity.”

-From the foreword by Lawrence Downes