Searching for Spenser

Parenting can be a struggle; especially parenting a child with Sotos syndrome. In her heartrending memoir, Kramar skillfully describes championing her disabled child through his short life. Written in starkly honest prose, Searching for Spenser examines the experience of loving and losing a child.

After she has attained success in her career, Margaret eagerly anticipates motherhood. When she gives birth to her second child Spenser, who suffers from developmental delays because of Sotos syndrome, she is devastated because her life has centered on achievement. Although Spenser overcomes the gloomy medical prognosis cast at his birth, her husband, an attorney, cannot reconcile his disappointment and begins drifting away from the family. One day she comes home to a house of missing furniture and emptied bank accounts.



After the divorce, Margaret struggles as a single mother. She barely scrapes by, and is lonely and exhausted from working full-time and maintaining a household by herself with two small boys. She meets a promising man at a dance and is swept up into a passionate romance with him, but the new man is reluctant to marry her because he does not want to commit to her children.



As his most ardent cheerleader, Margaret encourages Spenser to transcend the arbitrary limits of his disability. Spenser flourishes, emerging as a happy child who loves to act, dance, and draw. One spring day, while the other children are playing, Spenser clings to his mother at the school carnival because he is tired. Margaret takes him to the hospital on a Sunday night, and in a startling turn of events, he dies the following Monday afternoon.



After his death, Margaret questions whether she ever really knew her child. She searches for him in the memories of former teachers, relatives and friends, embarking on a journey that takes her beyond the grave, even to a psychic in Lily Dale, while she finds support and solace in the monthly meetings of The Compassionate Friends.

Written in starkly honest prose, Searching for Spenser chronicles the costs and joys of loving a child with Sotos syndrome.

Margaret Kramar taught English at The University of Kansas and Washburn University after receiving her Ph.D. in 2012. "Star Wars," a chapter from the memoir, appeared in Echoes from the Prairie in 2013, "The Soap Opera," a chapter from Searching for Spenser, captured the first place award in the 2009 Kansas Authors Club District Contest and another chapter, "The Birthday Party," appeared in Exceptional Parent magazine in 2008. A short story about Spenser was anthologized in Reading Lips: And Other Ways to Overcome a Disability, published by Apprentice House in 2008. Her work has also appeared in Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages, The Grinnell Magazine, newspapers, and other print and digital magazines.