There are conservatives who are stronger advocates for kids with disabilities than some liberals. And I don’t know anyone who is outside the reach of these pressures. Our culture lavishly credits parents for their children’s successes and judges them harshly for their children’s challenges; I am certainly not immune. What has helped me, strangely, is the ambivalence I had toward motherhood for much of my life. I never was one of those people with a fixed image in my head of who I would be as a parent and who my children would be to me; it just wasn’t a feature of my fantasy life. That probably
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