On July 30^th an email arrived in my inbox with the subject line Lilac Day. To be honest, I’m not a gardener. Soil rarely touches my hands. But even I know that lilacs traditionally have a late spring flowering season. What was my friend Phyllis thinking when she sent me this email at the end of July? She wrote:

Do you know about Lilac Day?  A day to voice support for those with Turner syndrome? Have I got the right syndrome? Saw it on Facebook!

Within seconds, I hit reply:

No, I didn’t know about Lilac Day, Phyllis. Let me assure you that there wasn’t a Lilac Day when my family was dealing with Turner Syndrome in the 1950s. Thanks for the info.

I sat at my computer, feeling a mix of euphoria and chagrin. A special day dedicated to Turner Syndrome awareness. What a wonderful initiative! A half century before, positive recognition for those with Turner Syndrome didn’t exist. The condition occurs in about 1 in 2,500 newborn girls worldwide, but affected families in the past typically grappled with this chromosomal condition alone. Nobody was encouraging us to wear purple on July 30^th to show our support for girls and women with Turner Syndrome. Yes, we wore lilac clothes non-stop in July — swim suits, halter tops and swishy garden party dresses — because lilac or lavender as it was more commonly called then, was perceived as one of those super-feminine colours. It didn’t have the significance in the 1950s that it has now.

But Lilac Day for global awareness of Turner Syndrome is about more than colour coding a condition that was once closeted. The effort to expand our understanding of Turner Syndrome reflects an increasing interest in diversity and difference. Andrew Solomon’s major work of nonfiction, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (2012), exemplifies the recent trend in books about exceptional children and their families. In an autobiographical vein, Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon (2009) is a clear-eyed and wrenching account of daily living with his son born with a rare genetic mutation. So, too, the famed British novelist, Margaret Drabble, provides a fictional rendering of raising a daughter with special needs in her novel, The Pure Gold Baby (2013). Each of these books strips away some of the previously harsh judgment surrounding difference. Today, for example, students with a disability are more likely to claim that label than they were in the 1950s, perhaps because the classroom benefits may outweigh the social stigma. In interview after interview, Andrew Solomon found that parents of exceptional children chose not to be embarrassed by their kids. Who can say what constitutes a “normal family” anymore? And this is a very good thing.

Still, Ian Brown can describe the fear, pity and even hatred directed at him as he walked along boulevards pushing his “hapless” son Walker in his stroller. Brown writes that he can imagine that “the parents of a handicapped, disfigured child ventured out in public with trepidation: that the prospect of being looked at and ogled and even laughed at were agony.” That was certainly the case in my family when we ventured into restaurants and shopping malls with a child who appeared unusually short for her age and had extra folds of skin on her neck, both characteristics of Turner Syndrome. In the conformist environment of the mid-twentieth century, atypical identities of every kind carried a burden of shame with them.

Will wearing lilac coloured clothing on July 30^th help to lift that burden? Yes, it already has. Here are a few posts on Facebook that demonstrate the power of the Turner Syndrome awareness campaign:

Sport your Lilac/purple/butterflies today with pride, and without shame. We are the faces of the next generation that will close the gap on the lack of awareness, by ourselves.

Happy Lilac Day Everyone. My baby girl Ella has TS. She is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. We both will be wearing our lilac/purple butterflies today!

Next year, I will be wearing something lilac on July 30^th. I may even shun my aversion to gardening and plant a lilac bush.

On a chilly March evening in Toronto, I attended the International Festival of Authors to hear Lorrie Moore read from Bark, her latest collection of stories. The candlelit tables in the Brigantine Room at Harbourfront Centre welcomed hundreds of Lorrie Moore fans, all pumped, sharing tidbits from their favourite Lorrie Moore stories while waiting to see the award-winning author. Her work, it turns out, is an easy conversation starter with the power to break the ice between total strangers. I was tempted to ask the unfamiliar woman sitting next to me, “If you had to pick just one Lorrie Moore story to read every night before bed, continuously, non-stop for a year, which story would it be?” Lorrie Moore appeared on stage before I could ask. Flashing a disarming smile, she told the audience to take cell phone calls during the reading. Not a chance.

Moore read “Thank You for Having Me,” the concluding story in Bark in which the protagonist and her daughter attend a potluck country wedding, the second union of the daughter’s former babysitter. Sardonic and somewhat sad, the story is filled with jokey observations and characters who defy expectation. Here’s how she described the daughter in the story: “She was fearless: she had always chosen the peanut allergy table at school since a boy she liked sat there – the cafeteria version of The Magic Mountain.” How gorgeous is that?

Of course, nobody in “Thank You for Having Me” acts in the way that the reader would expect. Not the restless Brazilian babysitter wearing a white wedding dress the second time around, the bride’s first husband who is now serving as the best man or his father who is still brooding over the loss of his sexy daughter-in-law. Yet even their nuttiest actions are presented as acceptable, a reflection of Moore’s high tolerance for quirkiness. In this particular story, she writes, “Let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over….let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way.”

Listening to Moore read, I felt like a smorgasbord of human irregularities was on offer. Take what you need, she seemed to be saying. So what if the protagonist had brought two Whole Food chickens to the wedding, accidentally cooked on Clean. Yes, the roasted chickens looked like road kill, but a taste of our errant ways may make us readers and writers stronger or, at the very least, funnier.