Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

This willful immaturity was overlaid with an affected Victorian prudery, aimed not at masking but at obliterating desire.

“Someday you can go to a therapist and tell him all about how your terrible mother ruined your life. But it will be your ruined life you’re talking about. So make a life for yourself in which you can feel happy, and in which you can love and be loved, because that’s what’s actually important.”

I used to think that I would be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis. I have decided against this viewpoint, in part because there is almost nothing about which I feel neutral, but more because I perceive those years of self-loathing as a yawning void, and celebration needs to fill and overflow it. Even if I adequately address my private debt of melancholy, there is an outer world of homophobia and prejudice to repair.

Jim Sinclair, an intersex autistic person, wrote, “When parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.”

Tobin Siebers makes a moving case for horizontal solidarity by pointing out that our disdain for people who cannot care for themselves is rooted in a false proposition. He argues that inclusion of disabled people “exposes the widespread dependence of people and nations on one another, dispelling the dangerous myth that individuals or nations exist naturally in a state of autonomy and that those individuals or nations that fall into dependence are somehow inferior to others.”

Parallels with mysogyny

Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy.

If I’d had to deal with a disability where you spend all your time in the swimming pool or a gym, I would have found it very difficult. But my field is literature. So, to have something about language was absolutely fascinating.

Bridget was so roundly teased for her errors that she came to suspect even her most powerful intuitions, which left her profoundly vulnerable.

She said, ‘We decided to have an abortion.’” Betty explained that some people in LPA were longing to adopt a dwarf child. The woman said, “It’s a second marriage for both my husband and me. We’re both very beautiful people. We like to ski; we’ve had troubles before; now our life with each other seems to be perfect. We don’t want to deal with something like this.”

“We were in a store once, and this little kid was hovering. So Clinton, who was twelve, ran around the next aisle and, as the kid came by, jumped in front of him and spooked him. The kid freaked out and broke down crying. I said to Clinton, ‘That wasn’t the right thing to do.’ He says, ‘But it felt so good, Dad.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, okay. That one’s for you.’”

In much of Europe, valued identities are still collective and conforming: Catholic, French, white. Difference is avoided as much as possible; it’s striking that limb-lengthening has been particularly popular in southern Europe. “I was looking at the literature from an excellent school, and they mention at the end, ‘We welcome children with disabilities,’” Monique said. “You’d never see that in a French school. New York is definitely the best place to live and now is the best time, too. I wouldn’t want to be dealing with this in my grandparents’ generation.”

“I don’t have a fear that everyone’s going to find out I don’t know what I’m doing as a mother because I’ve already admitted that. The question is how you educate yourself. Sometimes I think I’m a great mother. Sometimes I think I suck. I’ve never once in a million years said that I know what I’m doing being somebody’s mother. I barely know what I’m doing being somebody’s wife.”

“So I make myself perfectly charming to the other mothers. The woman who runs his nursery school believes in inclusion as a way of life. She called me the second week of school and said, ‘He has a major gas problem. Make no mistake about it: he’s already different. If he’s now the smelly little kid with Down syndrome, people are not going to want to play with him.’ That was brutally, beautifully honest. We

‘Imagine someone who’s been five years old for ten years.’ He’s Mr. Helpful around the house; he does all these things that a five-year-old would never be five long enough to learn.” Teegan added, “If you gather a whole group of six-year-olds together, they’ll have a much wider range of ability than any single six-year-old. So one might have grown up with professional parents in the city, so he knows about computers. Another grew up in the country and knows all kinds of wild plants, and how to find their way around in the woods. If you keep somebody at a six-year-old level for long enough, they’ll expand laterally. That’s what he’s been doing.”

In The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov said, “When many remedies are proposed for a disease, that means the disease is incurable.”

The EEG technician was digging into Jamie’s skull as she applied the electrodes. “That’s when we became advocates,” David explained. “That’s when we said, ‘No, goddammit! You’re not going to do that with our child.’ That was a first; I had always been a well-behaved person who followed the rules. Jamie has made me a far better lawyer. He has forced me to develop advocacy skills that have sprung from passion as opposed to intellectual arguments. We have consented to being interviewed despite being very private people because it’s part of advocacy. And Jamie’s been a pioneer in that arena, right from those first hospital visits, and we’re very proud of him.”

“I resolved to do things that I’m afraid of. Doing this—talking all about myself and the hardest parts of our life with you—is something I can give back to the world, and I decided just to do it, and I’m glad I did. It helped me to lay it all out like this; it helped me see how hard it all is, and how terribly much I love our son.”

over and took Bill’s hand, with a look of deep compassion. “I actually think it’s not believing in God that has given us that perspective. People always regale us with these little sayings, like ‘God doesn’t give you any more than you can handle.’ But children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They’re a gift because that’s what we have chosen.”

Parents are broken and full of error. Intention does not obliterate that error, but I think, contrary to Kunc, that it does at least mitigate it. Being hurt by those you love is awful, but it’s less awful if you know they meant to help.

no one pays to watch a six-year-old playing Hamlet.

It’s a classic feminist bind: she could have had a richer career if she hadn’t been a mother, and might have been a better mother if she hadn’t had a career.

False dichotomy

This means that who the mother is in the child’s eyes and who the child is in the mother’s are often in flux.

More than any other parents coping with exceptional children, women with rape-conceived children are trying to quell the darkness within themselves in order to give their progeny light.

The Left wants children to have the rights of adults but not the responsibilities; the Right pushes for exactly the opposite.

People often question a trans person’s authenticity in his or her affirmed gender. “I call myself a gender immigrant,” Jenny said. “I’m a citizen of this land of women. But it is true that I was born somewhere else. I came here, and I got naturalized.” Jenny laughed slyly. “Or unnaturalized, as the case may be.”

“When I transitioned, I felt like I had climbed out of a wet suit I had been wearing my entire life. Imagine that magnificent rush, the tactile sensations, as though your body had just woken up. But I also felt like this new person couldn’t go home, and I began to dismantle all my connections to Montana. At the time I didn’t know how thoroughly all of this saddened me, and to compensate for that, I started to turn my hometown into a place that I didn’t really need to go back to.”

He wasn’t, and I am just so glad that he had the courage to do something about it. No, if he had been happy to be Paul, anybody would wish for that, but since he wasn’t—I can’t imagine the courage that it took.