It is almost 2016, a year I couldn’t have imagined when I was a child. The idea of it, sure. I probably expected to be married with children, to have a job. But I had no concept of what that really meant.

Now I have a husband—not someone I sketched loosely in my head, but an actual person with his own thoughts and odors and television habits. I have a little girl who cracks up at knock knock jokes, and who says words that I swear I didn’t teach her. My sister is expecting her second baby—a real-life baby, not just a doll that we named and held and then left under the bed.

My life, it seems, has taken on a life of its own.

As a kid, I didn’t anticipate settling in California, a place that was once only familiar to me via The Babysitters Club books, with all their talk of granola and tofu and sprouts and Knott’s Berry Farm. A place that remained well beyond my reach until I crossed the state line in a U-Haul more than 15 years ago.

And I could no more have pictured a life with ALS then I could an alien abduction or the actual experience of childbirth. It wasn’t that I lacked creativity, but who at a young age could have colored in the life that would eventually be theirs? More to the point, what would we do if we had known? Read More>