Mark O’Donnell: I have met and known men who I consider the world’s greatest fathers. These three heroes of mine … fathers of special needs children. Here are some of their thoughts about being a daddy in their own words.

Bob Macer

“People think it’s hard and maybe the most surprising thing would be how much easier it is in a lot of ways.

“My memory of raising our first, ‘normally-abled’ child is filled with driving him from one activity to the next to the next, with barely time for conversation in the car. And that was before cell phones. With Annie it wasn’t like that then and isn’t like that now.

Annie had a hard start to life. Her early years were spent in an orphanage. When Annie wasn’t there, she was in the hospital.

It took a couple of years and a lot of help to build her health up but as soon as she started to feel well, she started to feel very well. I have never in my life seen a person as radiantly happy as she was in those years. It was a lesson I would never, ever have had a chance to learn during a long, privileged and comfortable life. After all these years I’m still trying to get my mind around it.

When she was fifteen Annie Rose did an Outward-Bound trip canoeing among some small uninhabited islands of Puget Sound.

After a few days of life on the island everyone was taken to their own isolated spot and dropped off with their sleeping bag and flashlight, some food, maybe a knife and matches. They were to be picked up two days later. Annie was proud that she was one of the only ones who lasted the whole two days.

We raised Annie to be as independent as she could be. When she was in her twenties, she made the decision that she wanted to live on her own.

After a couple of years on a variety of waiting lists, she was offered a room in what was basically a transitional housing building. She lived alone in her single room, ate in the cafeteria and microwaved her frozen ‘healthy choice’ meals, did her own laundry and looked after her own hygiene. On the weekends, she came home.

“Annie is very likable, but in her life, she doesn’t have to be likable to be loved – she knows that…but how would I have ever learned it without her?”

“She is short, round and brown and I am…not.  She has a gift for making herself at home anywhere and is never surprised that people like her and like having her around. She’s the best traveling companion I’ve ever had. Life with multiple handicaps can be a struggle – and she does – but she has a level of comfort and self-assurance that is quite remarkable, for anyone.

I worry about her chronic, serious physical issues but rarely worry if she’s ok – an impossible luxury that I deeply appreciate.

“Annie turned forty-one this year.

“She lives a life she (mostly) really likes: a job in the cafeteria of the enormous nearby high school (an actual job, with careful supervision and some assistance to be sure, but with real accomplishment and genuine human dignity – she trained for it in a yearlong program at the local community college and has proudly kept her diploma)..

“A day or two a week she goes to a most amazing art studio (www.northpolestudio.com. She takes the bus to church on Sunday and rarely misses a week.

Long ago G.K. Chesterton told a story about a terminally bored Englishman who sets out in his sailboat for a long adventure, gets caught in a storm and washes up on the beach a few miles from home. Disoriented from the wreck (maybe he hit his head), he thinks he is someplace exotic, far, far away and can’t get over how lovely the people were, how bright the colors, how interesting the conversations and patterns and way of life. When we took Annie into our lives, I became that man. It was nothing like what we anticipated or could ever have planned.  I’ve never gotten over it and, God willing, I never will.