In these pages, a mother recounts the birth of Andrew, her child with Down Syndrome, and how the loss of a second baby to cancer started their whole family’s journey through the maze of parenthood.
It tells of the support that Andrew received from his loving parents and siblings as he mastered the skills of life and became a contributing member of society.
It’s a book that teaches the age-old lesson about understanding the humanity and value of persons with disability, especially in an age where prenatal testing is shouldering parents with the heart-wrenching decision between terminating a pregnancy or having a less-than-perfect baby.
And while opportunities for the acceptance of the disabled have been dramatically improved, the book also challenges readers to reconsider certain attitudes about playing God in the pursuit of flawless genes.
A devastating wildfire, which destroyed fifty percent of the houses in her neighborhood in 1993, sparked Romy’s late-life writing career just as she entered her mid-sixties.
Realizing that all the materials she had gathered to recount the story of bringing up a child with Down syndrome would have been destroyed if their house had also burned, she took a college writing class and started her first book.
That book was published on October 26, 2012.
In the interim, she published two books on architecture. These were Caltech’s Architectural Heritage: From Spanish Tile to Modern Stone, published in 2000 by Balcony Presses, and Bertram Goodhue: His Life and Residential Architecture, published in 2007 by W. W. Norton. She also co-authored, with Charlotte Erwin, The President’s House at The California Institute of Technology, published by the Institute in 2001, and edited a book by Katherine Offenhauser, Bob Ray Offenhauser: An Architect’s Journey, published by Balcony Press in 2011.
And lastly, in 2017, she completed the monograph Eva Maddox: Innovator, Designer, Educator, published by Images Publishing Company.
