Patricia Robbins

"I always tried to look at each of my daughters as a person, not as their illness. I tried to think what would I want for them if it was me, and I wanted them to live as normal a life as possible, with hopes and dreams and not define themselves as a sick person first. Jeff and I always said to them that you can do whatever you want to do, and they did. It enables us to live with what is happening now because we feel we have done everything we could. Not having a big house or car really didn't matter because we had time. I look at the girls and I think how rich they have made our lives. Money could never make up for that. It has been a wonderful life because they are so positive and brave."

~Pat, an excerpt from In the Morning Light

Written by Pat, the girls' voices are threaded throughout each chapter of In the Morning Light, using their own words taken from a documentary, a news program and their journals allowing them to tell their unique story of living and loving.

"Imagine being a child living in your own magical kingdom, with mystical streams, enchanted forests, and your own little castle, shared with your best friend. By day you search in streams for fat frogs and slippery salamanders, lie in the cool clover under ripening pear trees, hoping that one may drop so you can have a scrumptious treat. By night, you would catch lightning bugs to put in a jar for a lantern, illuminating each other's face in the dark. And finally when it was time to dream, songs of the crickets would lull you to sleep. These fairy-time images make up the memories of my childhood. It was a time when all my dreams seemed in reach."

~Charlotte

"You should always go for what you want to go for, so that you don't sit there and think 'I wish I had done that or tried this'--even if it doesn't work out at least you would have tried it. I would sit down and look at my life and say, Listen, I could sit here and be miserable and depressed and say I have been given a bad rap, but everyone, some way or another, is given a bad rap. You have to look at the positives in your life and focus on that and that helps me move on."

~Vanessa

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