Andrew Solomon recently gave a TED talk based on his book,  Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.

The book is based on a series of interviews with families coping with a variety of isolating situations: deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. Solomon was so transformed by his experience talking with these parents, he decided to become a parent himself in the midst of this research.

If you don’t get to it, this is one of my favorite quotes from the talk:

“I thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems, problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid, and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting. And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws. If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle…

I decided to have children while I was working on this project. And many people were astonished and said, “But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?” And I said, “I’m not studying everything that can go wrong. What I’m studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.”

I highly recommend the TED talk.