Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon & Laurie Calkhoven

Author:Andrew Solomon & Laurie Calkhoven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Rape

A CHILD CONCEIVED IN RAPE gets as rough a start as a child with dwarfism or Down syndrome. The pregnancy is usually greeted as a calamity, upending family life that may already be very troubled. The mother is uncertain whether she will ever get over the very fact of the child’s existence. Rarely is a reliable partner on the scene to help. All new mothers are prone to ambivalence, but the hostility and revulsion often experienced by the mother of a rape-conceived child may be reinforced by her family. Society is likely to judge both mother and child unkindly.

Facing most disabilities, those who do not share a given condition struggle to find the humanity within it, while those who do share the condition gravitate toward one another for support, validation, and collective identity. With children of rape, however, the flaw is invisible to strangers, sometimes to family and friends, and often to the child, who must cope with its psychological shadow nonetheless. You can keep your child’s deafness or genius or autism secret only for a short time. Others are sure to notice; the child himself will usually notice. Children conceived in rape may go a lifetime without knowing their own identity.

Horizontal identities usually originate in the child, then spill over to the parents. Children conceived in rape, however, acquire their horizontal identity by way of their mother’s trauma; here, the children are secondary, and they are much less likely to find others who share their identity. The mother has the stronger horizontal identity, and the child has an aloneness that follows from it. The mother of a schizophrenic may find herself in a club she never meant to join, but that association is defined by her child. The mother of a child conceived in rape has her own, separate, primary damage to negotiate. Her identity as a mother proceeds directly from her identity as a rape victim. Her child embodies the violence against her and gives permanence to what she may ache to forget. Instead of being unhinged by a startling discovery about her child, she knows what is wrong even before she learns that she’s pregnant. Soon thereafter, like many other mothers of exceptional children, she must figure out whether she can love a child who is antithetical to anything she imagined or wanted.

Many people see children of rape as defective—including, often, their mothers. Unlike other factions perceived this way, this one has not come together into a thriving identity group. Even once a child knows his or her origins, he or she cannot easily locate others who share this identity. One of the few organizations founded to address this vacuum, Stigma Inc., took as its motto, “Rape survivors are the victims . . . their children are the forgotten victims.”

• • •

Marina James assured me that there was a good, quiet spot to talk at her neighborhood library in Baltimore, but when we got there, it was closed. It was a raw March day, but Marina guided us to a bench in a public park, where other people could see us, but not hear us.

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