Read Online Once in a Lifetime by Danielle Steel - Free Book Online

month, heavily medicated, no one had even suspected that she was pregnant. But whatever the reason for his hearing loss, it was permanent and it was total.
    Daphne came to love him with a fierce, protective zeal and determination. By day she spent every waking moment with him, setting her alarm for five thirty every morning, so she could be sure to be awake before he was, ready for what the day would bring him and to assist him with each difficult moment. And they were many. At first she was obsessed with the potential hazards that constantly lay in wait for him. In time she grew accustomed to anticipating the constant dangers of warnings he couldn't hear, car horns he was never aware of, growling dogs and pans of sizzling bacon. But the stress she was under was constant. And yet there were endless precious moments, times when tears of tenderness and relief flowed down her cheeks as she shared her life with her baby. He was the happiest, sunniest child imaginable, but again and again she had to face the fact that his life would never be normal. Eventually, everything in her life stopped except her activities with Andrew. There were no friends she saw, no movies she went to. She devoted every single moment of the day to Andrew, afraid to leave him with anyone else, terrified that they wouldn't understand as well as she the dangers and frustrations that confronted him. She took every burden of his life onto her own shoulders, and each night she fell into bed exhausted, drained by what the effort had cost her. There were times too when her own frustrations in dealing with a deaf child almost overwhelmed her, when the urge to shout at him for what he could not do or hear made her clench her teeth and her fists so that she wouldn't slap him. It was not Andrew she wanted to hit, but the cruelty of fate that had deafened her beloved child. She labored under a silent but leaden mantle of guilt, secretly feeling that it was her fault, that she should have been able to prevent it. She hadn't been able to keep Jeff and Aimee from dying in the fire, and now she couldn't keep this final brutal reality from Andrew. She was helpless to change it for him. She read every book she could find about children who were deaf from birth, and she took him to every specialist in New York, but there was nothing they could do for Andrew, or Daphne. She faced the reality of it almost with fury, like an enemy to be fought. She had lost so much, and now Andrew had too. The unfairness of it burned within her like a silent rage, and at night she would have nightmares about the fire and awake screaming.
    The specialists she had seen had suggested to her that eventually she would have to put Andrew in a special school, that it would be best for him, that it would be impossible for him to deal with normal children. And they also pointed out again and again that, despite Daphne's Herculean efforts with the child, there were stumbling blocks that she was unable to get over. Although she knew him better than anyone else did, even she had difficulties communicating with him, and the specialists warned her that in time she would come to resent him for her failures. She was not a professional, after all, they insisted, and he needed more sophisticated skills than she was able to give him. In addition, his constant isolation from other children made him suspicious and hostile on the rare occasions when he did see them. Hearing children didn't want to play with him because he was different, and their cruelty caused Daphne so much pain that she hadn't taken him to a playground since he was an infant. But still she resisted the idea of his being with other children like him, so she kept him to herself, the two of them prisoners in her tiny apartment, as the specialists continued to badger her about sending him away to a special school.
    "An institution?" she had screamed at the specialist she knew best. "I won't do that to him. Ever!"
    "What you're doing is a lot worse."