What About My Children?: They Were Never Yours to Save
The gate hinge came away in Tom Whitaker's hand the morning after his sixty-fifth birthday dinner. He expected loose screws. What he found was rotted wood - a problem no hinge was ever going to fix.
It is exactly the kind of problem he is facing everywhere else in his life right now, and
does not yet have a name for.
The night before, at his own birthday table, each of his four grown children told him
something true that he was not ready to hear. Anna, who spends her days sitting with the dying, no longer believes there is anyone listening to her prayers. Ben will not bring his eight-year-old daughter back through the doors of the church that raised him. Claire, a teacher who has learned to ask where a claim actually comes from, has started asking that question about the Bible she was raised on. And Eli - quieter than the others, easy to overlook - has stopped hiding the ideas he used to keep to himself.
Tom and his wife, Elaine, did everything right. They know they did. That is exactly what
makes the fear at 2 a.m. so hard to survive - the question of what happens to a child who dies without believing, the old warnings about judgment that will not stay buried, the creeping sense that love has quietly become a campaign to win an argument before it is too late.
What About My Children? spends a year inside this one family, refusing every easy way out. No child is talked back into belief. No parent is handed a tidy answer that makes the fear disappear. Instead, page by page, Tom and Elaine are asked a harder question than the one they started with: what if the love they were taught to offer was never supposed to have a condition attached to it at all?
This is a novel for every parent who has heard a grown child say something that frightened them - and for every adult child who has wondered whether being honest with their parents would cost them the relationship. It does not tell you what to believe.
It asks what your love is actually made to carry.
"There was no hinge for this."
A Novel
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
