Far From the Tree

“It wasn’t okay, not really, but she didn’t entirely trust her parents to be strong for her anymore. They could barely keep it together around each other—what sort of energy did they have left over for her?”

Maya’s parents have been arguing for so long that Maya spent many of her formative years watching them fight, and it has affected her own emotional development. Children are supposed to be able to trust their parents with their feelings, and instead, Maya feels like her parents are unable to be there for her because of their fighting. As a result, she has become emotionally closed off and refuses to communicate her wants and needs without sarcasm.

“Sometimes Joaquin wondered if he had been the worst baby in the world if his own mother didn’t even want to come see him.”

When it comes to his mom, Joaquin knows only enough to be confused and hurt by the conditions of her disappearance from his life. Unlike his sisters, who were adopted immediately, Joaquin spent the first year of his life with his bio mom, and he wonders if there was something he did wrong as a baby to drive his mother away. He blames himself, not his mother or the circumstances of her life that led to that point, and thus establishes a pattern of internalized shame.

“I’m trying to find our biological mom.”

Grace’s announcement to Maya in Chapter 4 sets the tone for the remainder of the novel. While Grace wants to find her mother, Maya and Joaquin make it clear that they have no interest in finding the woman who gave them up. For Grace, this mission is about finding the only person that she believes will understand what she has gone through (and is still going through) as a birth mother, and Grace will not rest until she has the chance to meet her mother face-to-face.

“He knew white baby girls were first-ranked on most people’s list of Children We Would Like to Have One Day.”

Joaquin points out the ugly reality of adoption and the undercurrent of racism in the adoption process. Joaquin is unsurprised to learn that his two white sisters were adopted while he stayed in foster care as a half-Mexican boy. The foster care system and adoption statistics skew heavily in favor of white babies, while children of color are often viewed as a second choice by many potential adoptive parents.

“[M]aybe now he could understand what people meant when they said that home was a person and not a place.”

At seventeen, Joaquin is starting to understand the difference between a house and a home. A house might be where a person sleeps and lives, but a home is where they are most comfortable with themselves. In this case, a home is a person who makes Joaquin feel like he can be himself, and love is a powerful force coupled with acceptance and grace.

“Somewhere in the time between when she’d had his daughter, met her half siblings, and returned to school, Max had gone shopping and bought new shoes, like his life was still normal; like it hadn’t changed at all.”

As Grace struggles to return to her “normal” life in the wake of her pregnancy and meeting her bio siblings, she is angry that her ex-boyfriend Max has continued on with his life without a care in the world. While Grace deals with a shaky home life, a destroyed reputation and emotional damage, Max gets new shoes. Grace locks in on this tiny detail as she fights to hold her own against the school bullies: Max’s friends and teammates seem to have forgotten his role in this situation.

“Bio always trumps foster.”

Joaquin delivers this ominous warning to Maya when he mentions an adoption that fell through. As a foster kid, Joaquin has had to deal with so many foster families that he has grown numb to this ugly truth: Foster parents will always choose their biological children over their foster children. Maya is shaken by this thought in light of her parents’ imminent divorce, and she wonders if either of her parents will want her at all.

“But at least I’m the only one getting hurt this time.”

Joaquin has bought into the lie that he is a dangerous person, and that his presence can bring no good into a person’s life. He thinks that if he cuts himself off from Birdie, Grace, Maya, Mark, and Linda, he will be doing them a favor. However, Ana points out that Joaquin is denying these people the chance to know him and love him, and by pushing them away, he is also hurting them.

“We can only imagine the conflicting emotions that you might have had [...] but please know that we cherish and adore Milly more than anything else in the universe, that she is our baby girl, but that she was once yours, too, and that the grace of your gift will never be forgotten.”

The note from Milly’s adoptive parents to Grace is full of love and compassion. They call Milly a gift and a blessing, and the word “grace” in this sentence is an allusion to Grace’s name. Grace can have many meanings, including forgiveness and gift-giving. In the case of Benway’s main character, both meanings are accurate. Grace has bestowed a wonderful gift not only to Peach’s adoptive parents but to Peach herself, and as the novel progresses, Grace has to learn the power of forgiving herself and trusting the adoption journey.

“She wondered when the novelty of having new siblings would wear off. And then they’d drift apart just as easily as they had come together.”

Maya, ever the cynic, wonders if her new siblings will grow bored of her and return to their normal lives without her. Of the three siblings, Maya is arguably the most excited about connecting with her brother and sister, and privately, she worries that they won’t like her enough to want to keep seeing her. Despite Maya’s sarcastic veneer, she craves connection outside of her adoptive family, and she wants to have a relationship with Grace and Joaquin.

“He always hoped that if he did the correct things, said the correct things, no one would realize that he was a foster kid.”

Early on in life, Joaquin learned that he was different because he was a foster care kid. After being treated like an outsider or a tragic charity case for so long, Joaquin has learned the art of blending in and hiding the fact that he doesn’t have a family of his own. He believes that if he can fool enough people into thinking that his life is normal, then it will be normal, and no one will look at him with pity anymore.

“One of the reasons Grace had given up Peach was because she hadn’t wanted her life to stop [...] but nobody had told Grace that her life might stop anyway, that she’d be trapped in the amber of her pregnancy, of Peach, while the rest of the world continued to change around her.”

By the time Grace learns that she is pregnant, her options are limited, and her parents decide that adoption is the best course of action for Grace’s future. Still, Grace is so overwhelmed by feelings of grief, loss, and loneliness that she feels unable to recover from having a daughter. She feels like she is stuck while people like her parents, Max, and even Peach move on with their lives as if nothing has happened.

“What if she doesn’t stay in rehab? [...] What if she thinks she’s okay and signs herself out and then hits her head again?”

After Maya’s mother falls and hits her head, she finally opens up to Grace and Joaquin about her mother’s drinking problem. Maya does not readily share her emotions with others, and when she admits that she is frightened for her mom, Maya shows a moment of rare vulnerability. She loves her mom, but she also feels angry and helpless, and Grace and Joaquin are there to support Maya without judgment.

“He loved Mark and Linda too much to let them adopt him, so if the decision was his to make, Joaquin would make it.”

Joaquin is still traumatized by the events that occurred at the Buchanan’s’ house years ago, and he doesn’t trust himself to not go back to his old ways. Joaquin refuses to believe that he is any better now than he was five years ago, and even though he loves his current foster parents, he believes that any attempts to adopt him will lead to the same pain and fear that the Buchanans felt when Joaquin accidentally hurt their child.

“She wasn’t ashamed of Rafe, of course. She was only ashamed of herself.”

When Grace starts hanging out with Rafe, she finds herself slowly being reintroduced to public settings after avoiding them for so long. Grace has been bullied into hiding, and now she lives in fear of being recognized and harassed by her old classmates, even though she is not currently attending her old school. Fear and shame are powerful motivators, and Grace blames herself for being in this position.

“What, so you’re just going to abandon your family now? [...] We’re too much trouble, so you decide to find something better?”

When Lauren learns that Maya and her biological siblings are planning to go looking for her bio mom, she is offended and hurt. Lauren has watched as Maya has tried to separate herself from her adoptive family over the past few years, and because her sister is spending more time with her bio siblings, Lauren starts to feel jealous. She is afraid of losing her sister, the only person she can count on in the midst of their parents’ divorce and their mom’s rehab stint.

“You’re my big sister. I don’t care where you came from and I don’t care what you look like. You’re mine, you know?”

While Maya has spent years worrying about whether or not she belongs in her adoptive family, Lauren never thought of Maya as adopted at all. To Lauren, Maya is simply her big sister, and despite the glaring difference in their appearance, Lauren doesn’t care. Lauren’s sentiment is well-meaning, but it also points out the disconnect between how she and Maya feel about things like the family portraits.

“That’s what parents do. They catch you before you fall. That’s what family is.”

Joaquin tells Ana about the day he told Grace and Maya about the Buchanans. He says that his sisters were there to hold him up if he fell, just like training wheels on a bike, and Ana points out that this is what parents do. Joaquin has never known these feelings of safety and security, and Ana is moved to tears at the idea that Joaquin might finally be starting to feel some sense of community with his siblings.

“Did you ever think about that when you were busy hating out mom, Maya? That maybe she did it because she loved us?”

When Maya and Joaquin learn that Grace had a baby and gave her up for adoption, Grace becomes very angry and defensive. She brings up Maya’s low opinion of their own birth mother, and Grace dares to argue a point that both Maya and Joaquin never seemed to have considered: What if their birth mother wasn’t a heartless witch, but a loving parent who knew that adoption was the best option for her children?

“I hurt you and I thought that I was only hurting myself.”

When Joaquin tells Grace and Maya that he broke up with Birdie to protect her, Maya calls Joaquin foolish and scolds him for pushing away the people who care about him. However, Maya soon realizes that she has been doing the exact same thing to Claire. It took her seeing the behavior in someone else before Maya could finally understand the foolishness of her own habit of pushing people away, and she almost loses Claire in the process.

“The dragon had won, and Joaquin was just a pile of broken bones and ash on the scorched ground, out of time and out of lives.”

When Joaquin storms out of Mark and Linda’s house after yelling at them, he feels like he has lost the battle in his mind. Joaquin doesn’t blame Mark and Linda for any of his life's problems: He knows they are good people who are just trying to love him as best as they can. Joaquin has been locked in a war against his anger for years, and he now feels like he has lost the battle and ruined any chance he had of ever having a family of his own.

“She wanted to breathe in each memory of her mother until it filled her up and made her fly across a pink-streaked sky, warm with fading light.”

Throughout the novel, Maya insists that she doesn’t want to find her birth mother. However, when the truth about Melissa Taylor comes out, Maya’s attitude changes. She realizes that her birth mother wasn’t heartless, but a victim of life’s storms and troubled circumstances, and Maya is emboldened by her mother’s strength.

“Someone had thought that he was worth saving.”

The discovery of the safe deposit box full of pictures changes everything that Joaquin once believed about his birth mother. After so many years of thinking he had no past and no future, Joaquin is humbled by a box full of photos and a handful of stories from his Aunt Jessica. The word “saving” here also denotes rescuing, and Joaquin realizes that he is worthy of love and rescuing, not only by his biological family, but by people like Mark and Linda.