"In Beautiful Mystery, Danilyn Rutherford reflects on her relationship with her disabled daughter Millie in a genre somewhere between ethnography, autobiography, and memoir. Rutherford's daughter was born with what at first seemed like severe autism but turned out to be an even more challenging inability to communicate in recognizable ways. Her husband dies suddenly while Millie is still young and Rutherford explores her daughter's journey from disabled child to disabled young woman, demonstrating the challenges of caring for a loved one and finding ways to communicate. Meditating on the cognitive mystery of Millie's disability and interior life, Rutherford writes from the perspective of a mother, widow, and anthropologist to trace a process of becoming and vulnerabilities in a mother-daughter relationship. She draws on the power of anthropological theory to assess her personal journey, convey the intimacy of interacting with disability, and imagine Millie's magnetic yet unknowable social worlds"--
When Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact, they took her to their pediatrician. And an optometrist. Then a neurologist. Later, to a team of physical and occupational therapists. None of the doctors could give Millie a diagnosis, but it was clear that her brain was not developing at the rate it should. At an age when some children take their first steps, Millie had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a three-month-old. Three years later, Craig died suddenly of a heart attack and Danilyn found herself on the precipice of her anthropology career as a widow and single mother, still trying to solve the puzzle posed by Millie’s inaccessible mind.
Now in her twenties, Millie has never been able to express herself verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her and in things her companions and family can see, hear, smell, and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways.
Beautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to live together in a fractured world.
In this enlightening and deeply felt memoir, Danilyn Rutherford tells the story of her life with her daughter Millie, who cannot communicate verbally, which has taught her that we do not need to understand someone to love them.
