Far From the Tree
To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon.
^^ Andrew SolomonOne of the most powerful books I've read in a long time, I was gripped by the first several chapters, not to mention filled with huge amounts of empathy for people and parents of all types. The book is huge---like, 25 hours on a Kindle huge---and I grew a bit fatigues by the end, but even reading half of it I was twice a better man and parent and so glad I started the journey. Definitely recommend, even if only you read the first chapter (free Kindle sample, maybe?).
Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon
The following are excerpts taken from Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree. Bold, italics, and notes are mine. Everything else is Andrew's.
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Because of the transmission of identity from one generation to the next, most children share at least some traits with their parents. These are vertical identities.Often, however, someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a peer group. This is a horizontal identity.--It is astonishing how often such mutuality has been realized—how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn’t care for an exceptional child discover that they can.
The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.
--Ten years ago, a New Yorker poll asked parents whether they would prefer to see their child "gay, happily partnered, fulfilled, and with children," or "straight, single or unhappily partnered, and childless." One out of three chose the latter. You cannot hate a horizontal identity much more explicitly than to wish unhappiness and likeness for your children over happiness and difference.--Everyone is flawed and strange; most people are valiant, too.--In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.”--One mother who lost a child with a serious disability worried in a letter to me that if she felt relieved, her grief was not real.--There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden. These parents need space for their ambivalence, whether they can allow it for themselves or not.
For those who love, there should be no shame in being exhausted—even in imagining another life.
--The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote, “It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.”--My study is of families who accept their children, and how that relates to those children’s self-acceptance—a universal struggle we negotiate partly through the minds of others.--In his classic work Stigma, Erving Goffman argues that identity is formed when people assert pride in the thing that made them marginal, enabling them to achieve personal authenticity and political credibility. The social historian Susan Burch calls this “the irony of acculturation”: society’s attempts to assimilate a group often cause that group to become more pronounced in its singularity.--All kinds of attributes make one less able. Illiteracy and poverty are disabilities, and so are stupidity, obesity, and boringness. Extreme age and extreme youth are both disabilities. Faith is a disability insofar as it constrains you from self-interest; atheism is a disability inasmuch as it shields you from hope. One might see power as a disability, too, for the isolation in which it imprisons those who wield it. The disability scholar Steven R. Smith posited, “A completely painless existence could also quite plausibly be seen as deficient for most people.”--Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.--Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital. And that should not be exclusively a horizontal principle; that should be handed down from generation to generation with the silver spoons and the folktales from the old country.The British critic Nigel Andrews once wrote, “If something or someone doesn’t work, it’s in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.”--
It takes an act of will to grow from loss: the disruption provides the opportunity for growth, not the growth itself.
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We all have our darkness, and the trick is making something exalted of it.
--“If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups,” Benjamin Jealous said.--Parents often laud what they rue most about their children to defend against despair. But just as belief can result in action, action can result in belief.--You can gradually fall in love with your child, and by extension with that child’s disabilities, and by further extension with all the world’s brave disadvantages.--I wish I’d been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes—and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.--Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy—even for salvation. When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined.--Reverse mainstreaming, in which nondisabled children are put in a classroom that is focused on the needs of disabled children and learn as the disabled students learn.--By narrowing a child’s options, parents define that child as an extension of themselves, rather than a person of his own.--Lisa said that, in spite of all her questioning, what had frightened her at first had, at some level, become unquestioned.“I was at Johns Hopkins Hospital for one of her treatments many years ago. I was carrying her on the elevator. This other mother got in with her child, who was drooling and had, clearly, a very profound case of Down syndrome. I was looking at her with total pity, like, ‘Oh, I can deal with mine, but I would not know what to do with yours.’ And that was exactly how she was looking at me.”--“Looking up all the time is hard,” one Little Person explained. “Not just hard on the neck, but hard on the spirit.”--Beck writes of the transformations her son has wrought in her own life.“The immediacy and joy with which he lives his life make rapacious achievement, Harvard-style, look a lot like quiet desperation."--The politically correct terminology in most of the world of disability is to identify the person ahead of the condition: you speak of a “person with deafness” rather than a “deaf person,” or a “person with dwarfism” rather than a “dwarf.” Some autism advocates take issue with the idea that they are “a self with something added,” preferring “autistic person” to “person with autism.” Others favor autistic as a noun, as in, “Autistics should receive social accommodation.” Sinclair has compared “person with autism” to describing a man as a “person with maleness” or a Catholic as a “person with Catholicism.”--Ari Ne’eman, who has Asperger syndrome and became a prominent self-advocate while still in college, uses the colloquial Aspie to describe himself. He said, “Society has developed a tendency to examine things from the point of view of a bell curve. How far away am I from normal? What can I do to fit in better? But what is on top of the bell curve? Mediocrity. That is the fate of American society if we insist upon pathologizing difference.”--Like many other mothers of exceptional children, she must figure out whether she can love a child who is antithetical to anything she imagined or wanted.--Everyone whose baby is typical can recount the incredibly special things his child does, and everyone whose baby is unmistakably peculiar will explain why grave illness or astonishing gifts do not really create a chasm between such offspring and other children. This mutual counterfeiting reflects a larger ambivalence, which is that we long for and resist difference; we aspire to and fear individuality. A child’s most challenging differences from his parents, by definition, manifest in areas that are unfamiliar to them. Our tendency to misrepresent children as more or less original than they are reflects our misgivings about the relationship between individuality and happiness.--When you have longed for the moon and are suddenly offered all its silver light, it’s hard to remember what you intended to do with it.--
Most of us believe that our children are the children we had to have; we could have had no others. They will never seem to us to be happenstance; we love them because they are our destiny. Even when they are flawed, do wrong, hurt us, die—even then, they are part of the rightness by which we measure our own lives. Indeed, they are the rightness by which we measure life itself, and they bring us to life as profoundly as we do them.
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I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
--You can buy the book here.