Martha and John Beck were on the fast track at Harvard in 1987. He was in the third year of his doctoral program, and had taken a job as a management consultant that required him to commute to Singapore every two weeks. She was taking a full load of classes and was being a single parent to their 18-month-old daughter.

Not an ideal time to get pregnant, by any means. Especially when it turned out that the baby had Down syndrome. But that was actually the start of a more fulfilling life for the Becks.

Martha Beck details those tumultuous nine months in her new book, “Expecting Adam” (Times Books). The Arizona resident will sign books at 5 p.m. today at Bookland in South Portland, then will give a talk and sign books at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Owl & Turtle Bookshop in Camden.

Both the Becks had spent much of their adult lives at Harvard. Looking back on her life on the hallowed Cambridge campus, Martha writes that she was ambivalent about the experience.

“[Harvard] was like having lunch with a brilliant, learned, witty celebrity who liked to lean across the table at unpredictable intervals and slap me in the mouth — hard. Was it interesting? Very. Stimulating: In more ways than one. Pleasant? I don’t think so.”

The Becks had spent the summer of ’87 in Tokyo, as John did research for his Ph.D. dissertation. While there, Martha had seen a style of puppet theater called Bunraku: “The puppeteers stand right onstage, moving these elegant dolls around without the slightest pretense of invisibility. The puppeteers are so skillful that you actually forget they’re on the stage … After a few minutes, you’d swear the puppets were moving themselves.”

In her book, Beck refers to September 1987 as the month It All Went To Hell, when events were no longer under Martha and John’s control. Instead, she felt that they were being guided by some kind of metaphysical Bunraku masters.

It started with their conceiving the baby that would eventually be named Adam. Then, other things started happening that Beck couldn’t explain. There was an auto accident, in which their rental car, after a truck pulled directly into its path, bounced off and careened across two lanes of a busy highway. None of them was injured. Then, Martha was unable to eat, because an autoimmune condition aggravated her nausea to the extreme, and she was too weak to move. An acquaintance showed up at her door, bearing a bag of the exact groceries Martha had been envisioning.

Later, Martha and daughter Katie survived an apartment fire, walking down 10 flights of stairs. For the last few flights, she felt a pair of hands bolstering her. Yet, photos of her exiting the building showed no one behind her.

Still Beck couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that she was getting assistance from these Bunraku masters, who seemed like guardian angels. Her turning point came one night in January 1988, when she suffered a placental abruption.

A placental abruption is a condition in which the placenta, which conducts nutrients from a mother’s bloodstream to her unborn baby, tears away from the wall of the uterus. Beck explained that the fetus dies in many cases, and the mother can also bleed to death, depending on the degree of separation.

“That was when I really surrendered,” Beck recalled by phone from her Phoenix home. “I was hemorrhaging, and I thought I might lose my baby. When I desperately needed help, I asked for help. That was when I crossed the border.”

Beck described what happened next in her book: “I felt a flood of warmth rush through my torso, It was extremely soothing, as intense as it was brief. The bleeding stopped instantly. I knew it … A set of hands seemed to reach out and catch me … One hand went around my back to support me, while another rested flat on my chest, across my collarbone. That incredibly soothing warmth emanated from the hands into my body … I began to trust these beings whose presence had shadowed my life for the past months.”

This required a major change in the thought process of Beck the social scientist.

“Until that point, I had followed the good old Baconian logic of refusing to believe anything until it was proven true,” she wrote. “Now I decided that I was willing to believe anything, absolutely anything I heard, saw or felt, until it was proven false … With this single decision, I expanded my reality from a string of solid facts, as narrow, strong and cold as a razor’s edge, to a wild chaos of possibility.”

A few weeks earlier, the Becks had found out that a test result indicated they had a 1 to 895 chance of having a Down baby. Nevertheless, they opted to have an amniocentesis done to be sure. The word came back in late January that Martha was carrying a Down baby, a fact she had already innately known. Both she and John knew, almost instantly, that they would keep the baby.

This choice was not popular among acquaintances at Harvard. From John’s revered mentor to the obstetricians at University Health Services, everybody was telling them to do what was right for their future.

“Not `everyone’ stopped treating me like a pregnant woman and began acting as if I’d contracted a terminal illness,” Beck wrote. “But precious few of the exceptions came from within the Harvard community, the community that had been my reference group, my `ideal’ culture since I was 17 years old. No one at Harvard seemed able to tolerate the thought of Santa’s leaving the wrong kind of baby under the tree.”

Adam was born with none of the conditions that often afflict newborn Down babies. A few years later, the Becks left Boston and settled in Arizona.

“[Adam’s birth] was the end of the world that I lived in,” Beck said. “In the world that I had lived in, it was a complete tragedy. But it was pretty cool when I found another world to live in, one that I liked a lot better.”

John is now a business consultant who still does quite a bit of international travel. Martha is a career counselor, the “Quality of Life” columnist for Mademoiselle and the author of “Breaking Point: Why Women Fall Apart and How They Can Re-create Their Lives.”

With both John and Martha raised in achievement-oriented families, it still took some time for them not to create impossible goals for Adam.

“It took a while after he was born to let go,” Beck said. “We had the diagnosis before he was born, and acknowledged he would never match those standards [they would have for a normal child]. But no child is going to meet every parent’s expectation. That was a tremendously painful experience, but now I feel so untroubled.”

Adam keeps bringing new lessons to the Becks. In the book, she wrote about one Christmas. His sisters, Katie and Lizzie, were pouting because they didn’t get exactly the gifts they wanted. Adam unwrapped a pack of batteries, meant to go inside another toy. He thought the batteries were the gift, and ran around putting batteries in appliances and toys around the house.

“Something about Adam always manages to see straight past the outward ordinariness of a thing to any magic it may hold inside,” she wrote.

Beck has few complaints about life with Adam, now 10.

“He still can’t talk very well,” she said. “Also he’s growing up more slowly, and still can’t be left to take care of himself. But he has not brought a lot of difficulty into my life. He’s such an easy kid to deal with.”

Beck urges people unhappy with their lives to be willing to make changes, to find something they like to do.

“Some people are so numb that they can’t even feel what they want,” she said. “They need to get some time and some distance from their daily lives, and need to just allow every negative, resisting thought to come up. Underneath, they’ll find a set of desires.”

This was a lesson that Beck learned the hard way.

“I felt like life was beating me over the head, trying to get me to say `uncle,”‘ she said. “It took a lot to wear me down. After a while, it didn’t seem like much of a loss to give up my [old] life.”