To N.C. For Helping Kindness

In early February, our little man was having a bit of a tough day. J.N., Emily, and I were trying to get him to play games with us, but he was agitated and disinterested. Pursuing avoidance, he ran into the kitchen and began yanking the silverware drawer open and closing it with emotion-packed slams. As I was cautioning Tony, his last pull forcefully propelled the drawer backwards off the rails against the tile floor, his body instantly stilled with confused shock.

N.C., thank you for fixing something broken beyond my current abilities to repair. I hid the pieces in my garage for two days, a new rectangular opening to our cupboards silently questioning what I was going to do, and yet I was entirely uncertain before your generous offer to rebuild the drawer. Thank you for doing this and replacing the part too damaged to reassemble. We will forever appreciate your kindness! 🙂

Some Reading To Consider

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

This book seemed like a great one to sandwich in between the two U.S. summer holidays celebrating parents. I purchased this book primarily to read the author’s examination of Autism and Disabilities related issues, however he evaluates the social impact and controversies surrounding several other identity differences between parents and their offspring. While the author chooses to occasionally dip his prose into the inkpot of his own opinions and experiences, most of the book consists of interviews seeking to represent multiple facets of thinking on an assortment of disability and identity differences.

He starts with his own experience as a gay man desperately trying to form himself into an image he felt his parents could approve of, and uses this as his launching pad to explore the experiences of those born with other distinguishing differences: deaf, dwarfism, Down Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, disability, prodigy, children of rape, criminals (the ranks of whom often include individuals with disabilities and mental health issues unable to obtain access to necessary assistive services), and transgender. This book is nearly 1000 pages, with each of these sections lengthy enough to pass for a shorter book by themselves. I believe this length is necessary to keep the sections from being too superficial to render a balanced portrayal.

In choosing to recommend this book, I know that some will have strong feelings and opinions one way or another about some of the groups and issues he discusses. Indeed, I myself cannot honestly profess to agree with the views of every person interviewed for it. But, to quote a comment by Hildegarde Boylan in this book, “It’s impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.” I would like to merge this with a comment by her daughter, Jenny, who said, “…because you can’t ever be loved if you can never be known.”

It behooves each of us, I think, to honestly listen to the stories of others- as we would wish them to honestly listen to ours. Our communities are not built from individuals formed of the same mold, and true love, as Jenny points out, requires genuine knowing.

Now, I am not anyone that the author is likely to ever hear about much less be concerned about my thoughts. That being said, while I think this is overall an excellent compilation, I personally felt like limiting his discussion on prodigies to the musically gifted was too one-dimensional to fully satisfy…there are luminaries of intellectual brilliance in other disciplines. I also took exception to one of his opinions on women who are raped, specifically when he said that some “lacked guiding intuition and were blind to bad character until it manifested itself.” Some perpetrators of abuse and rape are so charismatic and believably harmless, you could stack up a book of quotes longer than Mr. Solomon’s rather quickly with all of the comments in the media in my lifetime alone from individuals who never would have foreseen that certain someone they knew doing something so heinous as the crime of which they had been accused. I felt that while this may not have been the author’s intent, his comment was an oblique way of laying some blame on the victim, and I would have rather seen it left out.

I also felt that, in lightly touching a couple of intersex issues in the transgender section of the book, the rendering there was glancing at best and either should have been left out or given it’s own section. The intersex community, who are born with a number of genetic variations that present physically with aspects of both male and female sex characteristics, as a group are generally believed to fall pretty “far from the tree” in many societies, and their experiences deserved a more comprehensive representation therein.

I would look toward wrapping up my recommendation for this book by quoting the author from his TEDMED talk (Love, no matter what): “It turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed- there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, there are only so many families of children who are transgender, there are only so many families of prodigies- who also face similar challenges in many ways- there are only so many families in each of those categories- but if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what other people are addressing, then you discover that it’s a nearly universal phenomenon. Ironically, it turns out, that it’s our differences, and our negotiation of difference, that unite us.”

I agree that we are all more alike than we sometimes realize. Looking past the surface details to the more general themes in our lives can indeed reveal this, but listening with compassion to the stories of others is an important step to increasing an awareness of this and promoting higher levels of unity in our communities, which is why this book is reading to consider.