“Look there! A beast!”, he exclaimed as he pointed to my little girl sitting in her pram. He couldn’t have been older than five years old, but his words still stung.
My daughter was in hospital for yet another iron infusion, and I’d taken her down to the kiddies playground for a little bit.
“Dear God”, I fervently prayed, “let her not have heard that.”
“Would my little girl be subjected to such nicknames forever?”, I wonder as I look down at her sweet bandaged face.
This little boy, in his innocence, kept calling for the other kids to look at her, but they simply glanced her way, and continued their play. Thankfully, the kids he was with paid him no heed, so that was the end of that… I thought.
He, on the other hand, kept staring. He’d run around then come back and look at her, then run along and play again.
Meanwhile, I was internally struggling with whether or not to speak to him about what he’d said.
After about 10 minutes, I mustered up the courage and asked if I could speak to him.
Shyly, he agreed and came closer, and so our conversation began.
“Do you know she’s a little girl?” I asked, praying that I could gently convey my message.
“Yes”, he replied with a nod.
“You know, calling her a beast wasn’t very nice, and names like that hurts her feelings. It makes her sad.
Next time when you see a little girl or boy that looks like her, please can you not call them names like that.”
He nods his head, sits a bit looking at my little girl, smiles and goes back to running around with the other kids.
His attitude towards her after that changed. Although she stayed in her pram, he’d call to her from a distance showing her the birds flying about, the leaves, and whatever else caught his fancy.
We were discharged from hospital that day, but his initial reaction to her remained with me.
When driving home, I recalled another incident where we were walking down the hospital corridors and a boy looked at her in horror and said “Look! A monster!”
The poor lad got some serious reprimanding from his mother after that, but these two incidents got me thinking.
As adults, we wouldn’t generally point to a child and refer to them as monsters or beasts, and yet many kids refer to other ‘different looking’ kids with derogatory names. So where do our kids learn it from?
For the first time ever, I thought back to the childhood cartoons I so loved. I remember zombies having warts and ‘walking funny’, I remember the unpopular child having acne issues and scary mummies being the only characters bandaged from head to toe. Til today, I still love my cartoons, but I cannot for the life of me recall a single cartoon that had a child with special needs in it. Or an ordinary kid experiencing extraordinary everyday challenges. It could be that these cartoons do exist, and that I haven’t come across them yet, but the vast majority of cartoons don’t, in my opinion, showcase differences as being a good thing.
This incident also got me wondering how I would relay to her thing that everyone she meets, has their own challenges and that ‘not seeing’ a problem doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I wondered how I would convey to her that others challenges shouldn’t be undermined simply because she cannot see them.
But most of all, I wondered as to why I don’t engage kids regarding my daughter’s condition. I wondered if my words to him will have a lasting impression on him, and that other kids will not have to face name calling at his hands, simply because they are different.
Wow, Aqeelah,MashaAllah.First of all, you have great writing skills.I thought I was reading a novel written by a best-selling author.Secondly, Amatullah will get better, Ameen, She will be playing like the other kids and running around. May Allah completely cure her ameen.
Aslm. JazaakAllah khayr. Continuous du’as for Amatullah and that we as a family may learn the lessons He aims to teach us through this experience.