Winter

“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.”
― andrew solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“I told her that what was most important to me was not whether she loved a man or a woman, but that she loved and was loved well—that she experience passion, and the wonderful surprise of finding that someone feels about you as strongly as you do about them, lucky and full-hearted.”
― andrew solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we’d received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

“I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity