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no reason our son won’t someday do the same. Or better.
    Everything I have learned about the condition so far has both confirmed the seriousness of our adversary and given me a crack of hope that it can be beaten.

3
    ADJUSTMENTS
    By the time Aidan entered our life, Darryl and I had been married four and a half years. In that short period, we had lived in three countries on three different continents and in five homes. It would be easy to blame Darryl for our peripatetic lifestyle. After all, marrying him was marrying another world, one which he was unwilling to ditch to become solely American. And besides, he’s my husband and husbands are, by definition, easy to blame.
    But maybe that’s not completely fair, as signs of an international bias were evident before he came into my life. By the time we met, I had finished an International Relations degree, worked in Germany for two years, just spent several months studying Spanish in Guatemala and was launching into a Masters program with a global focus. The wheels had been greased for an international life.
    We remained in Stanford, California for the first year of our marriage; I worked as a development director for a nonprofit organisation while Darryl finished his PhD. It was a luscious year as newlyweds, but if I had thought our similarities would overwhelm any cultural or other disagreements, I was mistaken. There certainly were differences, both big and small.
    One morning I stepped out of the shower to find him frantically searching under pillows and through backpack pockets as though hunting for an unexploded bomb.
    â€˜I can’t find my khakis anywhere,’ I heard him say. Unable to fathom the urgency of this, as he was already dressed, or why he expected to discover them stuffed into a backpack pocket, I tried to help.
    â€˜Have you tried looking in the closet? That’s where I would normally put them.’
    â€˜The closet?’ he repeated, staring at me like he didn’t know whether to thank me or call the police. ‘Why on earth …’ trailing off as he headed towards the bedroom.
    â€˜Because that’s where clothes are supposed to live.’
    â€˜What are you talking about? I said CAR KEYS!’
    Attempting to adjust to his non-American vocabulary, I soon found myself getting in the lift and going down the footpath to the dairy . It was a two-way street as Darryl came to understand that in America chips are fries, crisps are chips, only a couple can be engaged (never a telephone), and the toilet is always called the bathroom , whether there is a bath or not. For me, the car was the most confusing and I ended up with a jumble of boots , bonnets , glove-boxes and windscreens .
    Any marriage requires adjustment, I told myself. As other newlyweds learn to take out the rubbish and squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom up, so we found ourselves adjusting not just to cultural and linguistic differences, but emotional ones also. From the beginning, we differed in our attitude towards conflict and communication. I have always tended towards the ‘get it all out there’ approach, which was how the game was played in my household, comprised of five women and my poor old dad. But Darryl, possibly because he was raised in a home with the ratio of four men to two women, would rather hum a merry tune and get on with life—preferably avoiding working through issues pieceby-painful-piece. These differences, though irritating, were manageable when it was just the two of us disagreeing about holiday plans or trying to decide on a movie at the cinema. They would prove far more challenging when the stakes were raised several years later.
    After Stanford we moved to London. Darryl taught at a university and I worked as a writer and ran special projects for an international aid agency. Over the two years there we provided a place to stay for travelling New Zealanders and Americans, hosting seventy-five friends, three of