Is this your child?
Is this your child?
someone asked me when I was shopping
in a crowded store.
Is this your child?
I stopped for a moment and looked at my son.
He hadn't let me comb his hair that day,
and he wore his favorite teeshirt
which was decorated in ketchup red and chocolate brown.
His face was smudged and dirty,
we had been to the park and he had fallen in a mud puddle.
He was singing
God Bless America over and over
in his offpitchvoice.
Is this your child?
She asked again
I looked into her unfriendly eyes
and cringed at her tone of voice.
Taking a deep breath
I ruffled that unruly hair kissed his smudgy cheek.
Turning to face her I answered
loudly and proudly
"Oh yes, this is my child
his name is Dhylan
Isn't he wonderful?"
c. 1999 Sally Meyer.
Autism is not the end of the World. . . . just the beginning of a new one.
I am learning to accept 'imperfection' because I haven't found anything more imperfect than nature. Perfection, I guess, is for fools. No one has achieved it yet, in anything anyone has tried. Nobody is perfect and everyone is flawed. I ask again, who is 'special' and who isn't?
I haven't met anyone with two identically shaped or sized eyes or nostrils or feet or toes or hands, have you? I haven't seen a flower with two petals exactly the same. Yet in our imagination, everything that is right has to be perfect.
Perfection is not natural. And what isn't natural isn't divine.
I salute all the mothers who struggle with our insensitive, unyielding world in bringing up children who're blessed differently and I wish them strength.
2 comments:
I am so glad you posted the poem. I am constantly amazed at the obsesion that our society has about colour. If people are so insensitive around children about color, I think they need to be themselves classified as blind so far as more complicated things like autism etc are concerned. The interesting thing is that sensitive parents teach their children to be sensitive to such situations. We need more of those. Difficult. But not impossible. Have lots of personal stories to relate.
Thanks...and I'm always waiting to read what you have to relate. I absolutely love your blog.
Very often it is not what we have to relate or say that bothers us, it is how it will be read and understood.
Yes we need to sensitise the world. If you read one of my first blogs here, you'd know how I think.
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