How often do we forget that our children are not us?

Even before we’ve conceived, we often imagine our children as idealized versions of ourselves.

Many of us are raised to follow the mold of our parents, to adhere to their chosen values and beliefs, because of some unspoken governing notion that what our parents believe is part of “the family system.”

But what happens when we are born in such a way that our physical appearance or identity alone belies the assumed facts our parents had for us, and goes against “the family system” of beliefs?

Why is it so difficult to accept differences in our children?

Andrew Solomon, one of my favorite thinkers and writers, explores this idea in his exceptional 2012 book about exceptional children Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.

“When we make a baby,” he writes, “we do not make ourselves as a baby as much as we have deluded ourselves into believing otherwise.”

He continues, unpacking the idea until it reverses itself with a universal truth often overlooked by parents (emphasis below is mine).

“Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to the environment, stimuli beyond our control. And yet, we are our children; the reality of being a parent never leaves those who have braved the metamorphosis.”

Yet, when our children are born with identities that do not resemble ours, when their preferences or abilities are foreign and unshared by their parents, and whose traits can only be found in groups outside their families, parents often flounder. The difference in their child becomes intolerably hard to grasp. And it’s no wonder. When we begin with the notion that our children are extensions of ourselves, their divergent identities throw us off, and many of us are left asking “Why me?”

These divergent identities, are ones not shared with the parents, and they can range from autism to dwarfism.

Solomon calls these unshared traits “horizontal identities.”

He distinguishes them from vertical identities, which are familiar to both parents and professionals.

Vertical identities are socially reinforced, highlighted, respected, and accepted. Vertical identities are passed down through genes and the environment.

They embody attributes like ethnicity, skin color, and language. Being born straight to straight parents is a vertical identity. Being born gay to straight parents is a horizontal identity.

And those born into horizontal identities are often subject to impulses that begin and end as perceived deficits their parents endeavor to fix.

Physical disability is a horizontal identity, and so is genius, homosexuality, autism, psychopathy, and learning differences.

I would add that there are also identities that may not be technically horizontal but for whom the parents rush to remedy perceived deficits, leading the child to feel horizontal.

I am one such person. My identity was more horizontal than vertical, but more vertical then horizontal. Perhaps I am a diagonal. Maybe you are, also.

My perceived difference was in my “failure” to match my peers academically, physically, and emotionally—all consequences of a panic disorder.

From when I was an infant until I was 25 years old, I had panic attacks that went unnamed and untreated, but whose symptoms led the adults in my life to believe I needed to be fixed.

I did not do well in school; my poor performance on standardized tests was cause for alarm. And because of these failures to test well, and excel academically, I was sent on an odyssey of more standardized testing to identify and “correct” the learning struggles that besieged me.

It wouldn’t be until I was 25 that I learned the root cause was not idiocy, but panic disorder, which affects behavior and learning. Often the visible symptoms of invisible disorders become the focus, leaving the underlying cause unaddressed.

We often try to fix what we can see and ignore what we can’t.

When you suffer from panic attacks from such a young age, you do not grow like other children. I was also physically tinier than everyone in my class and the grades below: slow to grow; slow to gain weight. My physical body was measured and weighed, plotted, charted, and classified, but my internal landscape was left alone, allowed to overgrow and tangle into itself, and strangle me.

The doctors considered growth hormones and leg extension therapy. When I learned they gave these hormones to horses, I was a firm NO. I was happy to be tiny so long as I didn’t have to take horse pills or get my legs surgically elongated.

Only, I did not feel that others were comfortable with who and how I was.

My learning issues stemmed from panic attacks, not intellectual disabilities, and yet, I was repeatedly told that I was a “slow learner.” I was told I couldn’t understand without help what other the other kids could alone. Tutors were hired, and my spare time was spent getting help to become like the kids around me. I knew I was “getting fixed';” that how I learned was wrong, and that my brain was the problem. I was, I understood, not normal. Also, I was stupid.

I was raised in an atmosphere that prized “normalcy,” where interventions were necessary if—God forbid—you didn’t match.

I didn’t match. I needed to be corrected.

When I read Far From the Tree, my breath caught on this sentence:

Those with horizontal identities (or “diagonal” as I feel I am) are often the object of parents’ impulse to correct and fix).

For those born with identities that challenge conventional “vertical” notions of normalcy, professionals and parents alike confer the word “illness.” But is an identity an illness? And who has the right to deem something “wrong” simply because it differs from what is common? Or because it feels “alien”?

After all, there was a time that homosexuality was deemed an illness. It was only removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in 1987!

This is not to say that we should not help our infants or get medical attention and care for our children who have differences that make their lives less livable.

The question is: Who decides what is acceptable and what isn’t? Who decides what is an identity and an illness, and who decides that someone is not suitable because we don’t understand them?

When a child is born with a horizontal identity, most parents rush to address the perceived “abnormality.” Parents worry for the horizontally identified child in a vertically identified world. Instead of fixing the world to fit the child, we often work to fix the child to fit the world.

We do this to make life easier for the child, but at the same time, we also do this to make life our lives easier, as parents. So many of us are affronted by the identities that belie our assumptions of who we are and how we identify.

Parents often misapprehend a child’s horizontal identity as a truth about themselves they’d rather not know. But, instead of accepting that truth or learning and gaining knowledge about that horizontal identity and accepting that it isn’t a reflection of our identities, we work to change the child so that we are comfortable in society’s flawed agreement about who counts and who doesn’t, so that we glow in our child’s reflected glory, instead of crack in the refracted lens.

We raise our children to imitate us, hoping—even assuming—that they will live according to our standards and beliefs and choose us as their template to build their lives so that we feel valid and worthy and, well, right.

Yet, if we are to continue along this line, fixing what perhaps doesn’t need fixing, then what are we doing but eliminating identities simply because we confer they have less value? When we consider identities that don’t match ours as different, we invalidate them as legitimate identities.

Why is being deaf an illness instead of an identity? Why can’t being deaf be an identity that requires no fixing but demands society opens itself to a larger embrace?

When we look upon our children as different—as other—we are not seeing them for who they are, only for whom they are not. We are expected, by other parents, teachers, or doctors, to correct our children, to “normalize” them, and eradicate their differences.

Instead of fixing what we deem incorrect, perhaps we should be curious and go toward our children’s specific experiences and learn what it means for them and society. We must learn how to speak the language our children speak so that we can work to make a more inclusive society, to accommodate differences instead of erasing them.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about these ideas in the comments! And if you’ve read the book, please weigh in!

Until next week, I remain…