Love & Legacies

The contradiction of moms & daughters

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My daughter has an autoimmune disease that might shorten her life… and I’m the one who gave it to her.

Every parent’s worst nightmare, of course, to be responsible for something terrible happening to your child. And, to be honest, I had little idea that this was a possibility before I had kids. I knew that one branch of my family seemed to have bad luck when it came to getting sick early in life and that about half of them died when they hit middle age. But that didn’t have anything to do with me, right?

Wrong. Not bad luck, after all. Instead, it’s a gene that’s a ticking time bomb, and one that my daughter has inherited. After she got sick a few years back, we had to go through rounds and rounds of tests to find out why her immune system wasn’t keeping up its end of the bargain.

There are other things that I’ve given her, of course. My dark brown hair, my brown eyes, and a love of creativity. She became a published writer when she was just 9 years old — I showed her how to send out her poetry to editors, and she got a wonderful poem about mermaids picked up by a kid’s magazine for publication.