Involuntary Joy describes the thoughts and feelings that went unshared when Joy Newcom’s first child was born with spina bifida, hydrocephalus, an imperforate anus and other birth defects in 1991. As his day-to-day realities became her own, she experienced an involuntary transformation, eventually leaving a career she loved to become a stay-at-home mom who worked part-time.
She chronicles her first five years as a mother in this candid memoir. Her story is an emotional quagmire of jumbled career aspirations, misshapen personal expectations, weighty family obligations, misguided spiritual assertions, and a complex marital alliance.
Involuntary Joy relates the fullness of her story, with blemishes exposed and vulnerabilities offered for full examination as this excerpt shows.
Joy M. Newcom 