“Don’t worry. She won’t break.”
This is a classic cliché of new parenthood. “Don’t worry,” nurses say to insecure new parents hesitant to hold their infants. “She won’t break.”
But I know the truth: Babies can break. I broke when I was eight months old, and a year old, and again and again and again. Three dozen broken bones before my twelfth birthday.
And then, at 31, I passed a flawed gene on to my daughter—the gene that caused my osteogenesis imperfecta (OI or “brittle bone disease”) and makes bones fragile instead of resilient.
For my daughter’s second birthday, we bought a child-sized couch to provide a safe place for her—our tiny, fragile girl—to climb without the risk of tumbling from the regular couch to the floor. As she climbed around on the new mini-couch, she fell and broke her leg.
I could not make up a better introduction to the capricious disorder we live with. Last year, my daughter (now 12) fell down a flight of stairs while lining up for a choir concert. She was embarrassed, but fine. A few months ago, she was putting away a laptop computer in her science class when her arm cracked under its weight.
