After I wrote about horizontal identities week before last (and I still mean to read Andrew Solomon's book, Far from the Tree), I ran across an article about a woman, Tiffanie DiDonato, with dwarfism, that referenced Solomon's book. The article I found was in Allure, but still. It gave pause. DiDonato is strong and admirable as hell. But the fact that her grandmother and her father wanted her mother to give her up for adoption: horrifying! The article (by Judith Newman) isn't available online, but I wanted to quote a paragraph from it below (December 2012, p. 132).
When Tiffanie Lorraine DiDonato was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to parents of normal stature in 1980, her father, Gerry, was advised by his own mother to give his child up for adoption. He told his wife, Robin, to choose between him and the baby. She chose her baby and left him. Tiffanie's father spent the next six months unable to eat or sleep, and the couple divorced, but six months after that they got back together. Gerry has spent the rest of Tiffanie's life making up for that initial bad decision. (It appears to have worked; he and Tiffanie adore one another.)
Talk about triggering; all's well, I suppose. DiDonato is healthy, married, and has a son of her own. She has taken charge of her life, and is happy in her body, which is more than many of us can say.
More power to Tiffanie DiDonato and her family, and to her mother, who stood strong in the face of what must have been overwhelming pressures to relinquish.
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