Book review: Far From the Tree

I love books about people with disabilities (and their parents’ memoirs). This is part of my ongoing series discussing the books on this topic that I have loved most.

Probably my favorite nonfiction book of all time is Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, Solomon, who is a brilliant writer, spent over ten years doing research for the book, interviewing families whose children had deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, and who are transgender. There is a different chapter for each of these, and they are all riveting.

The experience of these families is universal not only in their love for their children, but in their struggles with coming to terms with the fact that their children are not like them — they have what Solomon calls different vertical identities; i.e. identifies passed down from parents to children. He contrasts this with horizontal identities, which are identities we share with our peers, such as the deaf or dwarfism communities.

All parents have to come to terms with their children, to some degree. When we first think about becoming parents, we imagine that our children will be, not exact clones, but people who are slightly better than us in every way. What we usually get is something different. We all have to get to know our children for who they really are. It is a shock, for sure. We special parents have just a more extreme shock, and usually it comes much earlier, often starting at birth.

Our capacity to love can expand from these experiences. Listen to the author describe the positive comments of heartbroken parents of the severely handicapped, who go through incredible difficulties trying to raise their child:

“For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed that they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn’t yet know enough to want. As such parents look back, they see how every stage of loving their child has enriched them in ways they never would have conceived, ways that are incalculably precious. Rumi said that the light enters you in the bandaged place. This book’s conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.”

Solomon was not a parent when he started the process of writing the book, and may have written a better book because of it. He describes the parenting journey with a clear eye and without sentimentality. I especially loved how he describes the positives of having a disabled child, because I feel that this happened to me:

“Having a severely challenging child intensifies life. The lows are almost always very low; the highs are sometimes very high. It takes an act of will to grow from loss: the disruption provides the opportunity for growth, not the growth itself. Constant high levels of stress may age parents of profoundly disabled children, making them crankier and more vulnerable, yet some cultivate a deep and abiding resilience. It turns out they have grown more skilled at handling other life stresses. Even as the downside wears you thin. the upside keeps on giving. The more difficult the problem, the more profound these positives may be.

This doesn’t happen with the milder cases.

“Mothers reporting higher levels of caregiving demands for their child with intellectual disability also reported more personal growth and maturity.“ the Canadian scholar Dick Sobsey, himself the father of a disabled child, and his colleague Kate Scorgic write, “Parents of children with relatively mild disabilities may be more likely to adjust or accommodate by making minor or superficial changes. Conversely, parents of children with more severe disabilities may find it more difficult or impossible to go on with their lives as before and, as a result, may be more likely to undergo transformations.”

“Positive transformations are achieved when initial dis-equilibrium, which is traumatic and brief, gives way to psychic reorganization, which is gradual and enduring. It would appear to be true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

It is both amusing and honest that the parents Solomon interviewed are not united with each other. They all tended to think that their particular problem was not as bad as the others:

“Almost everyone I interviewed was to some degree put off by the chapters in this book other than his or her own. Deaf people didn’t want to be compared to people with schizophrenia; some parents of schizophrenics were creeped out by dwarfs; criminals couldn’t abide the idea that they had anything in common with transgender people.…The compulsion to build such hierarchies persist even among those people, all of whom have been harmed by them”.

His riveting chapter on the parents of the Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold will stay with me always. Solomon spent a lot of time with the Klebolds, who appeared to be totally normal parents, and were as horrified as anyone about what had happened. “Among the many families I’ve met in writing this book, the Klebolds are among those I would be most game to join,” he wrote.

Sue Klebold’s comments say it all: “Over time, I’ve come to feel that, for myself, I am glad I had kids and glad I had the kids I did, because the love for them — even at the price of this pain– has been the single greatest joy of my life.. . .I know it would have been better for the world if Dyland had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me.”

What a testament to the power of love. To me, all of the parents in Solomon’s book represent humanity at its best. I can only hope to be so brave.