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A lot of these situations began without hope
Parents were told your child has a disability, a deformity, a strangeness,
a quality that you weren't counting on.
And the parents' initial feeling was of despair.
But as they began to reckon with those children, many of them began to experience hope.
And many of the children helped to bring about that hope
simply by emerging as human beings in their own vividness,
their own exuberance in life, their own engagement with the world.
Hope is the necessary precondition of understanding any condition as an identity.
In a way, you can say that illness is despair, and identity is hope.
And a lot of the people in this book were struggling toward hope
and they were struggling toward understanding their condition as identity.
There are many different kinds of hope that come into this conversation.
One of them is the medical hope of being able to fix some of these conditions which are difficult,
and the other is the social hope that we can create a more accepting world
in which the differences people have are valued instead of stigmatized.
And i think the primary hope within families
is that the parents and the child will be able to have a mutually loving relationship
and I found that hope was gratified over and over and over again
in the most surprising circumstances.