"It must be like feeling happy and sick to your stomach at the same time," said my neighbor, the man with the chickens in his yard, Aconas and Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds whose eggs have yolks the color of the sun.

He could have been talking about so many things, really: the double blue line on the little plastic stick with my first pregnancy, or learning with the second that we were going to have twins. Each of my babies, taking that first step away from me, toward a new world of walking and eventually running and before you know it, they're grown and gone to college.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The happy/sick feeling, this time, is because my book is making its way through cyberspace on an Internet book tour. The book I wrote is about my life as Avery's mother, and because being his mother isn't separate from any other part of my life, it's about his brothers, too, and my husband Tom and his parents and my parents and even my friends, who did nothing to deserve this sort of thing other than be so funny and wise and generous that I wanted to write about them.

Here I am, hanging out our dirty laundry, one piece at a time. The guilt after Avery's diagnosis and through most of the first year? Put it on the line. How about the grief and the sadness? Hang them like a matching pair of socks. Ignorance, fear, prejudice? Out on the line too, flapping in the breeze for all the world to see.

There are other things to air: happiness so bright and bold I'm afraid putting it in the sun will make it fade. Or the baby clothes--sweet, precious onsies so small I worry that if I put them out in the open, the wind will carry them away. All my maternity clothes, and the nursing tops with complicated closures. It's all out there now, every last thing.

"But you wrote a book!" you say. "Surely, you must have thought it would be read someday." And it's true, I did think about it, but only a little bit. In my mind, I had one reader. She was a mother with a new baby on her chest, sitting in a rocking chair. The baby was sleeping, the house was quiet, and the lights were dim. She didn't have a laptop, or email, or me, just a few keystrokes away.

People write and say, "Congratulations!" and "Enjoy!" and "You deserve it!" But in my heart, I know differently: I don't deserve it. And that's what makes it so complicated.

When the twins were barely home from the NICU, and our life still seemed like a ship with a giant cannon hole blasted through the middle, I'd find myself trying, very hard, to find a reason for it. Could it be this? Could it be that? What was the purpose? What, exactly, was the point?

I remember Tom sitting me down on the couch, taking my hands in his, and very gently saying, "The problem is you think life is fair. Life is not fair. It's not fair and it's not easy. But life is good."

As soon as he said it, I knew it was true. I'd been walking around with the scales of justice hanging from my neck, trying to balance one thing with another--a little more on the left! Whoops! Right, right, go right! It was too big of a job, this cosmic keeping-track, and Tom's words allowed me to put down the burden. I accepted it: life is not fair.

And now that my dirty laundry is hanging out on the line, instead of being judged (Your whites look a little dingy, or, You really could have used a stain stick) something else is happening, over and over and over again. Emails saying things like, "I did the same thing!" and "I know exactly what you mean!" and even, "I felt that way too, in the beginning." So much good will, so much kindness, so much support.

I was ready to accept that life isn't fair in the hard sense of it--that some children don't have parents who love them and that not everyone gets enough to eat every night and that a microscopic dot of extra genetic material had changed the course of my son's life as I'd imagined it, forever.

But I didn't know about the goodness, the love and joy that could radiate for no reason other than the sun is out. I am a woman alone, hanging her wash to dry, until you all joined me. You stood alongside me and began pinning up your own things and when you did, forgiveness streamed through the clouds like sunshine.

Thank you.