On the first page of DANCING WITH MAX, Emily Colson’s father, Chuck Colson, summarizes the book: “This is a story of triumph in spite of the suffering and pain. It is most of all a love story, and a story about changed lives --- Emily’s, Max’s, and also mine.” Emily’s prose poignantly portrays transformational moments in her New England household and neighborhood. Then in the epilogue Chuck tells his own story --- learning new patience, deeper levels of love and joy --- thanks to his relationship with his grandson, now 19 years old, who has difficulty communicating with others and controlling his fears as well as his joys.

Emily tells her story with disarming humor, starting in chapter 1, where she introduces herself as a 17-year-old who panicked in an automatic car wash when water gushed in through vents near her ankles. And what did she do? She threw the hatchback in reverse. “That was many years ago, and I haven’t backed out of a car wash since. But I have felt exactly the same way: the challenges ahead looking just as threatening…

“But I have survived.”

A second chapter moves right into a traumatic day when Max is nine. The school calls and tells Emily, a single mother, to come and pick up Max because he’s “really having a rough time.” Against her better judgment, she then takes Max into a pharmacy where he has a complete meltdown. She ultimately asks the manager to find her a “big guy” to help her get Max, “still kicking and screaming into the car.” This short chapter sets the scene, giving a sense of Max’s mode and more: the reader will eventually see Emily’s relentless push to get Max therapies and schools that will maximize his potential despite his being labeled as “noncompliant” and “unteachable.” “At the school I was greeted with the hospitality one might extend to the Unabomber, as if I had some evil plot to ruin the teachers’ and administrator’s lives.”

I expect the book would be insightful for parents of children with special needs and disarmingly so, for in relating events even on the most difficult days, Emily inserts a sense of humor that by its very nature seems to brighten and broaden out the picture. But this is so much more than a book for stressed parents. The inspiring anecdotes (presented in short chapters) are infused with hope. You see and understand the critically important role of supportive friends, in Emily’s case this includes family, a women’s Bible study group, and men at her church who welcome teen Max into the “Grunt Crew” ministry that stacks chairs after the Sunday service --- even though Max is temperamentally unable to attend the service itself. You see incidents in which strangers have lightened Emily’s load --- or not. You see Max asking to be baptized and inviting members of his adaptive bowling group to pray before their after-game sandwiches.

I read this book on an airplane, and there, in public, I had to hold back the tears. That’s the kind of book Emily Colson has written. Well.

    -