When They Don’t Understand
By Katie Blackburn
@katiemblackburn
It’s an unseasonably warm evening in late spring. As the witching-hour becomes more and more ridiculous with six young children, my husband and I decide to put the kids in the car and head to one of our favorite playgrounds on the shore line of the lake near our home. We are just over an hour away from bedtime, so, feeling extra clever, I put the toddlers in their pajamas before we leave, anticipating they will fall asleep on the drive home. I picture pulling into our driveway as the sun finally goes down and victoriously transferring their sleep heavy bodies straight into bed, witching-hour professionals that we are. Is there some kind of award for this parenting brilliance and foresight?
When we pull into the playground parking lot, we see a magazine-worthy family of five having professional photos taken. A gorgeous couple, two young girls dressed in coordinating earth-tone outfits, and a brand new baby girl with an olive green flower on her head. So, basically the opposite of us. I sternly tell our motley crew, half of whom are in whatever mismatched pajamas I could find before we left and wearing the snow boots I had not yet put away for the season, Do not go near the photo area. Hey, look into my eyes, Team: we are not going to interrupt their family photos, ok? I get a few nods of understanding as they all take off toward the playground. Beckett promptly falls on the gravel because it’s hard for a toddler to run in snow boots, but we dust him off and send him on his way.
After twenty, maybe thirty minutes, Harper, our oldest, asks if we can go down to the water. The county had just put the dock back in the lake after the ice melted, and skipping rocks off the surface of the still water before we head home sounds like the perfect ending to our night. Witching hour has nothing on us.
As we head down, I see the magazine family is down on the shore, too. It looks like they are just finishing their couple photos, and the two older girls are standing near the water.
Cannon, our eight-year-old, our sweet and kind and autistic boy, runs straight for the dock with a smile on his face and a skip—no, a leap, in his step. Beckett gleefully follows in his footsteps, as toddler boys do with their big brothers, and Alex stays nearby. I can hear Cannon’s giddy, happy squeals from the shore. Harper has found the two magazine family girls, and I sit down with the baby and play in the sand with our other toddler, Ava—already regretting I had put pajamas on her because they are filled with wet sand.
But Cannon’s squeals are not just giddy and happy. They are I have an idea squeals.
“I jump in the water!” he delightedly yells in our direction.
Alex and I look at each other, a mildly panicked, knowing look, from our stations on the beach. He wouldn’t do that here, would he?
“I jump in the water!” he says again, then sits on the edge of the dock and lowers his feet—shoes and pants still on—into the lake.
He would. His laughter evidence of his intention.
“Cannon,” Alex says sternly, but with a playful edge to his voice. “Don’t you jump in the water, it’s so cold!”
“It’s chilly!” Cannons giggles, then pulls his legs out of the water and, to our great relief, scoots back on the dock.
I notice the magazine couple, having finished the pictures of just the two of them, walking toward their girls, toward us. “You have such a beautiful family,” I say to the handsome dad standing between me and Harper, who is still playing with his daughters. “I hope you all were finished with your photos, that our crew didn’t bring too much chaos to the background,” I offer lightheartedly.
“Oh, we were done,” he says, his head on a swivel from Cannon’s playful antics on the dock to his daughters on the sand next to us. “So how many kids do you have?” he asks as he scans the beach area. Standard. It’s usually the first thing strangers ask.
“We have six,” I tell him. “Always a party at our house.”
“Mmmhmm.” A slight smile, at least I think it’s a smile, but his eyes are fixed on Cannon, who has decided to put his feet back in the water.
Alex is warning him again, willing Cannon not to jump in, but he’s on the other end of the dock keeping a toddler from copying his big brother and jumping in, too. And then we all watch, as if in slow motion, as Cannon lowers himself off the edge of the dock and with a happy “ahhhhh” lets his whole body fall in.
“Cannonnnnn!” I laugh from the beach, with the air of a mom absolutely not surprised at the behavior, just silently trying to figure out what to do with a soaking wet eight-year-old and zero towels in the van. “Did you jump in the water, you goof?”
His little body paddles to the shore, smile as wide as the lake he is currently fully clothed and treading water in. When his feet find the bottom and he walks to shore, heavy and dripping with water that could not have been warmer than 45 degrees, he answers with pride, “Yes!”
What I need to tell you is that for the last six years we’ve been fighting a daily battle with a force so strong, so outside of our control, we’ve learned which mountains to die on, and which to laugh off. The difference is vital to our lives.
Are we irritated that Cannon didn’t listen to us? Sure. But we can overlook some wet clothes, especially when they come with a very happy heart.
But we are not able to explain the last six years to this stranger
The magazine couple continues to stare, as if in shock. I don’t know if the dad is watching us for a reaction, and our laughter does not match how he thought we should respond, but he picks up one of his daughters, tells the other one “let’s go” and as quickly as he starts talking to me, he escorts his girls away.
Harper stands up and without a word, without even a look from me, senses exactly what is happening and tries to explain.
“Excuse me,” she says as the man wrestles his daughter—who does not want to leave—into his arms. Harper is leaning her body, trying to get this dad to look at her without fully stepping in front of him. Her effort breaks my heart. “See, my brother jumped in the water because he has a disability, and… ” her voice trails off. Despite her pleas for empathy, for understanding, for just a moment of his time, magazine dad is not listening.
Harper looks at me in defeat, then takes a few quick steps and attempts to hide her body behind mine. “Can we please go home, Mom, please?” she pleads.
“Oh Harper girl… ” I say back, but the rest of my words disappear, lost in the flurry of my own feelings. A microcosm of our life as a big family, with all of our ups and downs and layers and complexities—including disability—just unfolded in front of a stranger in 90 seconds. And he didn’t get it. For perhaps the first time in her young life, Harper learns how much it can hurt to trip and fall on the rock of feeling completely misunderstood.
In this moment, I want so many things: I want to run after the family and let magazine dad know how awful he just made my nine-year-old feel; I want to tell him we are doing our best, and that I’m not immune to feeling misunderstood either. I want to help my husband wrangle a soaking wet child and a toddler who still wants to do exactly what he just saw his big brother do. I want to find the six-year-old, who is indeed at the beach with us but the last time I saw him he was up in a tree somewhere. And mostly, I want my daughter to know she’s a great sister, and there is nothing to be embarrassed about.
But she is embarrassed. She’s mortified. I can see the sadness in her big blue eyes that she will not move to meet mine. Her efforts to explain her brother, to explain this part of her life, were not acknowledged. And all I can do is sit with her while she feels it.
Our drive home is quiet for the first few minutes. And because we were not prepared for swimming, Cannon is naked in the booster seat, with only a small muslin baby blanket covering his middle. The toddlers are covered in wet sand—no one’s going straight to bed when we pull in the driveway. Harper is quietly crying in the seat behind me, and I attempt to tell her everything I believe to be true:
Don’t worry what other people think of you.
Cannon is awesome, and unique, and he’s doing so well, and it’s ok if not everyone knows that.
God sees you, Harper, he knows how you feel.
I’m preaching to myself with every word I say.
The next morning, as we are loading up to head to school, doing our normal Do you have your lunch, your backpack, your shoes? dance, I remember Cannon’s shoes are still in the van. I get everyone buckled into their seats, then go to the trunk to grab his favorite black Nikes. Oh goodness, I think with a smile, then walk over to the side door with his shoes.
“Harper, watch this.” She turns her head to look at me as I turn Cannon’s shoes upside down, and a stream of water falls from them. We both start belly laughing.
“Well, he can’t wear those to school!” she giggles.
“He’d be squeaking down every hallway though, it could be a fun prank on the teachers?” I say back. “They might think he brought a duck to school?”
She’s laughing harder now, imagining her little brother and his squeaky shoes skipping down a linoleum floor. We spend the ten minute drive to school thinking of other ways wearing a pair of soaking wet shoes to school would be the funniest thing ever.
Mothers learn backwards sometimes, I think. We start out knowing everything about children, and then we actually have one. All we “know” gets parred down to prayers like “Help, Jesus,” one experience at a time. But I am confident in this: sometimes we just need a minute to be human, to not force ourselves to an optimistic ending of a story, and to mourn feeling misunderstood.
Then when we are ready, and only when we are ready, we can dump the water out of our shoes, and keep going.
Written by Katie Blackburn, whose book Gluing the Cracks: Reflections on Motherhood, Disability, and Hope is now available for purchase. Katie hopes everyone touched by disability will read it and feel understood. And everyone who simply knows someone touched by disability, will read it, and give someone the gift of understanding.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.