My Seussical Life for 2005 April 29 (entry 2)

(2) Fri Apr 29 2005 15:14 Bittersweetness: I overheard Atticus answering questions about his leg in the other room, where he was playing Nintendo with Mark's eleven and twelve year old friends.

"What did you do to your leg?" Another boy asked, "Did you break it?"

"I had surgery." he said, and then went on, "I was born with it. I kind-of crawled weird."

I'm not sure if Mark's friends understood what he was telling them. It is also hard to know what Atticus understands about his own body. I wonder sometimes how he feels about himself. Does he consider himself to be different from other children around him? Does he recognize that his left side is partially, mildly paralyzed? Does he see that as a limitation, or a challenge?

I want Atticus to grow up a self confident, happy child. I hope that our conversations help him to understand his uniqueness in a positive way. I sometimes want to cry about the whole thing, except that Atticus has so much sweetness and optimism.

He handles things better than his mother.

Comments:

Posted by Sabine at Sat Apr 30 2005 12:00

You know he gets his sweetness and optimism from what he receives at home. Hmmmm....who could be projecting that at home?
Looking forward to seeing you when you get back.
Love,
Sabine

Posted by Joe Walch at Wed May 04 2005 12:08

He is learning very important lessons about his humanity and mortality very early on. I think you are doing a great job of facilitating his learning while cultivating his childhood with creative and happy experiences.

Louise and I had a long 2-3 hour discussion on this (disability and living with imperfections in our mortal life) last sunday. Somebody told her at church what a "blessing" it must be to be blind ("how fun!!"). I don't think so, but we are both sure learning from our own narrowly tailored weaknesses.

I don't think Atticus will really understand until he starts to see the limitations of his disability. At grade school he will find that he can't run as fast, and later he will find that he can't go into the military if he wants to. There is always so much that can be done, though, that he will probably not pay much thought to what can't be done.