Shadow Child : An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss

Like many young women with career ambitions in the redefining 1960s, Beth Powning struggles with the decision as to whether, and when, she should start a family. Her ambivalence over motherhood in time dissolves, and she becomes happily, healthily pregnant at the age of twenty-four. Then, late on a cold February night, eleven days past her due date, under induced labor, Beth delivers a stillborn son. She names him Tate." "Jacob arrives several years later, to Beth's joy, but in her mind her second son does not grow up alone. Tate emerges from the shadows of her consciousness, and though she does not speak his name for twenty years, he haunts the days that tally her guilt. But not inexorably. In the loving acknowledgment of both her children Beth eventually finds the strength to come to terms with the conditions that life imposes upon each to us: with birth and death, with happiness and pain, with losses, with hope, with the work of the soul and labor of time.