Even if our kids are perfectly healthy—born with all their fingers and toes—they all have their own issues. One kid has asthma. Another has attention issues. This one is allergic to half a dozen things. This one is dyslexic. Your son struggles with depression. Your daughter has migraines. This one just would not sleep through the night.
Whatever it is, it hasn’t changed how much we loved them. It’s just become as much a part of our family as anything else, a reality we’ve come to terms with. We deal with it. We work to find solutions. We’ve taken them to doctors and specialists. We’ve reassured them a thousand times. We’ve held them as they’ve cried about it. We’ve held our spouse as they’ve cried about it (and in turn been held). We’ve done enough research to get a degree.
But what’s interesting about each of these issues is that out there, right now, there are people who deny that it even exists.This thing we have struggled with, experienced, explored, that our children have been defined by—someone else thinks it’s made up! Or totally overblown! Nobody was allergic to this stuff when I was a kid. Kids today are just soft. They just need to focus. They just need to get over it.
This is painful and frustrating, isn’t it? Ignorant and hurtful? Of course it is. They are denying your reality, pretending like you chose this, like anyone would choose this. A while back we talked about Mary Laura Philpott’s reflection of how she used to scoff at kids who were supposedly very picky eaters. Sure, she thought, until her son was diagnosed with epilepsy. “I had no experience,” she later wrote, “with the panic that rises in a human heart when it’s your job to take care of someone, but despite your efforts, they can’t or won’t respond to your care.”
We have all done this. All been guilty of this. We all flippantly dismiss issues, illnesses, diagnoses that we know nothing about. We let profound and heartbreaking family issues become pawns in the culture wars. We judge. We don’t open our hearts enough to see that almost certainly those families are wrestling with whatever it is, just as we have wrestled with things in our own family.
This must end. They need empathy and understanding. They need help…and if you can’t offer it, at the very least, you can leave them alone. They are not asking to be judged by you. Your opinion is based on nothing.
