As much as we try to control our lives and protect ourselves from suffering, to become a parent is fundamentally a radical act of hospitality, a promise to welcome and care for a tiny stranger who comes along, whoever he or she may be. We know there will be joy; we are not promised an absence of grief. We are lucky that medical advances have reduced dangers to young children, and parents are now supported in caring for those who need more intensive care rather than being pressured to institutionalize them. Even so, a lifetime of caretaking is just one of the possibilities opened in parenting; we are all a genetic typo or two away from a metabolic disorder that injures the brain. And a world in which someone asks if my daughter is a burden, however life-changing her disease has been for all of us, is a world on a dark path.

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