Margaret Lanik spent a lot of time in pediatric hospitals in the 1980s as her infant daughter battled cancer.
She saw a lot. Lots of despair. Plenty of fear. And way too much isolation -- caused by a feeling that the various life-threatening illness the children there were fighting made them different.
"Some of that can be pretty debilitating," Lanik said.
The mother of three took those observations, thought about them for a few decades and finally made the decision to turn them into a book that was published in 2018 and remains on the shelves of every national book distributor.
Five years later, it remains just as relevant as ever — maybe more so today in this day of polarization.
"Different Means You're Special, Silly," is the tale of a bunch of animals, all with disabilities, helping each other to flourish.Â
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Each of them has a difficult obstacle to face and they soon discover that by helping others, they don't have to face them alone. Along the way, they help another friend face his fear, which sometimes can be the biggest obstacle of all.
"Every character is hidden until someone comes along and helps them," she said. "A lot of it is just reaching out to people."
Isn't that what life's all about? Things become so much easier when there's someone there to assist with the heavy lifting. It's a recurring theme of movies, songs and, yes, books.
Writing the book "was (cathartic) to me," she said. "I’ve also had people come to me and say ‘it helped me so much, or 'it helped the siblings so much.’"
By the time she sat down to write it, Melissa, her oldest child, was a contributing member of society.
In 1985, few people gave her a chance of beating her bout with medulloblastoma, the most common form of brain cancer in children.
"Back then, they didn’t give her a lot of hope," Lanik said.
Melissa proved them all wrong. Now 37 years old, she has a master's degree and is a probation officer in Wahoo.
"She's doing great," her mother said.
While Melissa's life episode was the motivation for the book, by the time her mother got around to the writing, the real beneficiaries were every child who has since come along with their own kind of challenge.
Lanik has always had a love for children. You don't grow up the youngest of 13 without a love of family and an understanding that the people around you matter most.
"We didn't have a lot, but we were so close," she said of the living conditions at the family farmstead just outside of Ceresco. "It was crowded, but it was great."
That kind of upbringing taught her the importance of family. That farmhouse is still the gathering place for family Christmases and Easters.
Lanik ran a daycare business for years before becoming a Realtor and insurance agent in Wahoo 27 years ago.
She's out of the child care business but a copy of "Different Means You're Special, Silly" still occupies an honored space on the desktop of her real estate office.
Her children -- Melissa, Mychal, the head baseball coach at Lincoln East High School, and Matt, a senior account executive at the Lincoln Journal Star -- are each married and have combined to make Margaret Lanik a grandmother four times.
That's stirred some ideas for her next children's book, one that she's in the process of writing.
It deals with a young boy who considers his grandfather to be ordinary because he's only ever seen the man feed the chickens and lead a methodical life at his country home.
When grandparents day arrives at the young boy's school, he is embarrassed to bring his grandfather, but he does and is surprised to learn that his grandfather, the guest speaker at the assembly, was actually a war hero as a young man.
"The message is not to judge someone by what they look like," Lanik said. "Some people have a lot more to them. You just have to get to know them."
There's always a lesson. Always a takeaway.