As both a parent and child (and as a member of a *world* of parents and children), a revelation.

<Having a child with a horizontal identity vastly different from that of the parent, Solomon argues, is a kind of magnifying mirror for the parent’s character and capacity as a human being:

Having exceptional children exaggerates parental tendencies; those who would be bad parents become awful parents, but those who would be good parents often become extraordinary.

But the dynamic flows both ways:

Parents’ early responses to and interactions with a child determine how that child comes to view himself. These parents are also profoundly changed by their experiences.

“Love can change a person,” Lemony Snicket wrote in Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid, “the way a parent can change a baby — awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.” But Solomon makes a case for precisely the inverse — that a child can change a parent, just as awkwardly and with just as much of a mess, through the power of love:

Self-acceptance is part of the ideal, but without familial and societal acceptance, it cannot ameliorate the relentless injustices to which many horizontal identity groups are subject and will not bring about adequate reform. … To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how often such mutuality has been realized — how frequently parents who had supposed that they couldn’t care for an exceptional child discover that they can. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.

What Solomon’s key point boils down to is a necessary and thoughtful addition to history’s most notable definitions of love. In the closing pages, he writes:

Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones. My journey toward a family and this book have taught me that love is a magnifying phenomenon — that every increase in love strengthens all the other love in the world. . . .>

In his stirring TED talk, Solomon paraphrases this already poignant sentiment even more beautifully:

I do not accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones.

Love is so essential a quality that we all understand what it is.

Yet love itself is harder to find than it should be.

It does seem that love is elusive, but harken to your own words of encouragement:

http://pandawhale.com/post/16952/the-math-of-love-calculating-the-odds-of-finding-your-soulmate

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