Columns | What Genes Can’t Tell Us

“Who Else Has a Son Like Mine?” A Mother Searches for Other Parents Who Lack Medical Answers

How many days had we spent asking the same questions of God or doctors? How long had we wrestled with conditions that didn’t yet exist?

This is What Genes Can’t Tell Us, a monthly column by Taylor Harris on parenting, genetics, and the quest for answers to medical riddles.

Sometimes when I’m reading to my seven-year-old daughter, she’ll suck in a big breath, seal her lips, and begin moving her right hand, fixed in a Y-shape, back and forth between us. Her hazel eyes will grow; her chest will puff out. It would be torture to make her wait, so I usually stop to acknowledge the sign her first-grade teacher taught her.

Did you really lead a group of slaves to freedom by reading the stars, or are you just a Black person who likes the sky?

something

did

.

didn’t

us.

likeness,

Great Gatsby

Me too, me too. I have a connection.