Viridian5's Reviews > Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

I finally had to give up on Andrew Solomen's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity because parts of it kept making me angry. When I picked up the book I thought it'd be a thoughtful piece on people different from the parents--like deaf children with hearing parents--and how they have to find what he calls "horizontal" identity and to some extent support from people like them outside their family. I didn't know it would have such a strong agenda about it, an agenda Solomen follows through with no matter what the facts he just relayed tell the readers.

I just wanted to read about these groupings without having somebody else's judgment of how I should think and what group I belong to constantly shoved in my face. Ironically, that's exactly the kind of thing a lot of this book is arguing against.

This agenda is most pervasive and non-stop in the introduction. Solomen's eternal position, only occasionally and lightly diluted, is that all difference is automatically better for people and society. Always. I agree that disability desperately needs to be destigmatized but his position that parents should accept and encourage every natural aspect of their offspring, even a lot of the very harrowing self- and family member-harming behaviors, can be hard to accept, especially since it's difficult to tell from later parts of the book how much support and medical intervention and what kind of education he thinks is improving the offspring's life and what's warping them out of their natural condition.

One of what he calls "horizontal" groupings is the disabled and his thing is that the disabled have their own culture and shouldn't be selected out and told they're not normal. I can understand some of the reasoning behind this, but "the disabled" is too large a grouping and I do not identify with people who would think my disability, Chiari I malformation, is a valuable condition with an important culture to be respected. I don't want another person to be born in this world who suffers from Chiari the way I and too many other people do, including young children. If I could fix myself and every person in pain on my Chiari support groups, I would want to do so. And it's not because society oppresses me into thinking my condition is abnormal, it's because nobody should have to go through the kind of intensive, risky surgeries and procedures full-flare Chiarians have to go through or live with the daily pain and various debilitating physical ailments. This kind of life shouldn't be considered normal. Don't count me in your group! Don't parse what's "normal" physically for humans based on how lifespans were decades ago since I would've died young, slow and in agony and wasting away but undiagnosed, a few decades earlier.

I'm neuroatypical but not like someone with some form of autism, which gives me different concerns and problems than them, and that's a smaller group than "the disabled."

Every time I read myself lumped in with his "the disabled" it's like biting down on tin foil.

Another problem is that he makes every condition directly analogous to him being gay. Parents opting not to carry a child who will have a lifelong painful and debilitating condition is not the same as opting not to carry a baby they find out will be gay. It's not even close! And he ropes in a lot of different conditions into being analogous to being gay: people with a number of physical and mental health differences, children of rape, children who become criminals.... Once again, he makes general blanket assumptions about a huge number of people.

I made it through his sections on the deaf, dwarfs, autism, and part of schizophrenia. The section on the deaf was very interesting, though I would like to have seen more about different parts of the brain develop for language based on whether it's a visual or verbal language. The fights over who's deaf "enough" in the community, though.... In the dwarf section he gives tiny mentions of the many debilitating physical problems some dwarfs have due to their structure. He says that most of them wouldn't mind staying short but would like to get rid of the physical pain but since they can't, whatevs, man. Beautiful diversity!

The section on Down syndrome is relentlessly sunny, with very little time given to the negatives of the condition that Solomen can't blame on society. Down syndrome people are so sweet-natured, and they make their parents and siblings better, more moral, more outgoing, and more sympathetic people. Everybody wins! (If a family member told me that my disability made him/her a better person, I'd punch said person. Glad you found personal benefits in my suffering.) Meanwhile, my roommate knows a single mother with Down syndrome son who has no family support and is totally failing to handle it well. He's learned from her that tantrums get him what he want and he's super aggressive, having been suspended from his special school a few times for throwing furniture at other, usually smaller, students, something that's getting worse as the testosterone that comes with his age is kicking in.

The sections on autism and schizophrenia are more harrowing, with the stories talking about people harming themselves and assaulting family members, smearing their own feces and blood around, going on rampages, and many needing to live with family or in a group home for the rest of their lives, and parents and family members having depression and mental breakdowns from having to deal with the system to get the massive help in education and medical care necessary for autism and carefully watch a child 24/7 to make sure they're not destroying themselves, the house, or another person. During one instance of a watcher looking away, an autistic child started strangling her sister. But all this is great too! Somehow.

And all these experiences are directly comparable to each other!

I can't get too far behind the idea that we should let everyone go off their meds if they wish because I live in a city, which gives me experience with mentally ill walking the streets doing what they wish, unmedicated, as their "natural" selves. (Deinstitutionalization is not the greatest.) I've gotten screamed at out of nowhere, including a woman who came up on me yelling that I better stop looking at her but I managed to talk her down enough to get away. One homeless man who didn't like that my brother wouldn't give him money no matter how threatening he got took advantage of us going away from my car to rip my car's diver's side sideview mirror off and tried but failed to yank my car's fuel door open to mess with my gas tank. New Yorkers know to be somewhat cautious while interacting with dickish strangers because they can be armed and dangerous. Also, a lot of people have been pushed to their death in front of subway trains by random strangers.

This book is mostly made up of anecdotes, so mine should be worth something too.

I didn't even get to the child of rape section, which better not be as directly compared to everything else here, including homosexuality, since the author can't stop bringing that in.

I was getting too upset so I gave up at page 345 because I couldn't make it to 900-something.