No Controversy

Occasionally you see articles that call drinking during pregnancy a controversy. There is no controversy. No known amount of alcohol can be ingested during pregnancy without risk to the fetus.

You may tell yourself that one drink wouldn’t hurt anything. You may even know someone who drank during pregnancy and her baby turned out fine. But the risk is still there, and children in studies are only followed until age five. Neurological damage may not be obvious until children enter school unable to focus, comprehend abstract concepts, or control behavioral outbursts. Or until the teen years, when mental illness develops. Or young adulthood, when your baby ends up on the street.

Perhaps your doctor told you it was all right to have a glass of wine or two. But individual doctors are fallible. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. Surgeon General, and the Center for Disease Control advise pregnant women not to drink alcohol at all. No amount has been proven safe. The same amount of alcohol that might help you relax has a much more powerful effect upon your developing child. You would never give your baby a bottle of alcohol. The fetus is vastly more vulnerable.

Drinking during pregnancy is not completely a personal decision. It is also a public health issue. Sixty percent of those affected by FASD commit crimes, many of them violent. A baby with a fully functioning brain is much less likely to be a burden and a danger to you, your community, and to him/herself. I say this from the heartbreak of having raised an alcohol-affected child. Don't play roulette with your baby's brain.

Is This a True Story?

Yes, all of the events in the book Sandy My Name are true. Much of her dialogue was written in Sandy’s own words, indelibly seared into my brain.

To maintain the privacy of those in the story, I changed names and some settings to disguise identities. The only two real names in the book are Sandy’s and mine. 

But when Sandy changed her last name during our trip to Colorado, she also changed her first name. Since the name Sandy was so significant to the book, I didn’t want to change it. And it could be confusing to change the name of the main character in the middle of the story. So I kept her name as Sandy. I had already given her a different last name to protect the identities of her birth parents.

Notes and records I kept along the way helped me remember the sequence of events and conversations. At times I had to fill in dialogue, staying true to the intent, with what could have been said. In order to streamline the narrative, I used a few composite characters and compressed some of the action. Most events in the book are unaltered in any way.

Finishing

Two years of outpouring, six years of shaping, twelve main revisions, and I still wasn’t done. Insightful friends read the book. With their feedback, I continued honing the story line, dispensing with superfluous cuteness and reining in secondary characters. I combed through the book again and again, tinkering with words and phrases, learning to trust my own voice.

Finally, I started to think I was done. Multiple times I thought I was done, but after letting the book rest, I could see there was still more to do. In some areas I needed to go deeper. I steeled myself to re-visit my mother’s role--her alcohol-induced dementia, but also her younger years, which helped me find a bit of resolution. I’d resisted her for a long time.

I had to force myself to add the hardest parts: Ron’s brush with mental illness and our marital difficulties. Both are compressed, so as not to take over Sandy’s story. But it was fallout from and part of the picture of our life with Sandy. Many families of the mentally ill often deal in isolation with living hell. The stress ends many marriages.

I hope we become more willing to grapple with the complex topics of mental illness and fetal alcohol brain damage.

As I send SANDY MY NAME out into the world, my hope is that her story will convey both the tragedy and danger of prenatal alcohol exposure. Her life should have been different. For all our sakes, we need to do better. I hope the world will take notice.

The Work

After a year of writing, I looked at the outpouring of emotion and jumble of scenes from Sandy’s life and knew I needed help to structure it into a story. I started going to writing groups. The first time I read aloud, I cried, overwhelmed by the unexpected emotion of sharing Sandy’s story with strangers.

Gradually I got used to exposing my work to public view. Reading aloud to an audience helped me hear what needed work. I got feedback, lots of it. And I learned by listening to the critiques of other students.

I wrote with a passion. “You can do it, you can do it,” I told myself. On weekends and summer vacations writing was my second job. During the school year I’d get up at 5am, make a cup of tea, and settle in for some work on the book before I had to leave for my teaching job.

I was a woman with a mission. No one seemed to know anything about fetal alcohol brain damage--not teachers, not therapists, and certainly not the public. I wanted to tell Sandy’s story so people could see what fetal alcohol exposure really meant. I wanted to make those abstract words concrete; I wanted to bring them to life.

As I wrote I opened myself to the truth of my emotions. Going back again and again to the events of Sandy’s life helped me gain insight. Even more than the therapy I’d done after her death, it helped me process the trauma and pain. I would have been lost without it. Writing was what helped me pull my life together. Writing helped me heal.