How Blind Is Unfair

My son and daughter were playing on or around our bed tonight while they were getting ready to go upstairs for bed.   I was just coming in from dog training class so I missed the actual event, but I heard my daughter screaming as my son ran out the front door.   I came inside and heard something about an ice pack so I went to get one.

My son came back in a few minutes later, after the ice pack had been administered and my daughter had calmed down.   My daughter wasn’t upset at this point, but my son was.   He was upset because my husband had yelled at him or had gotten upset at him or that’s how it felt to him, because my daughter had gotten hit in the eye.

And this is the part that both my husband and I felt badly about: my son said we cared more about her because if he had gotten hit in the face or eye or whatever, we wouldn’t have yelled at her.   My son was pretty upset.   He said he wished he was blind and deaf, because then we’d care about him more.

So we had a conversation.   I asked my daughter if she felt like we were unfair to her and that we cared about her brother more sometimes.   I was rather hoping she would say yes to this and I’d be able to talk about perspectives, but she said no.   My husband was talking to my daughter about eye drops while this was going on so I took a chance to ask my son if he liked video games, because if he was blind, he wouldn’t be able to see the screen and he would never be able to play a video game again.   He doesn’t understand what it’s like to be blind, even though he lives with a blind sibling, he just sees the inequity.

We told them both, and I told my son more later, that we always tried to treat them equally, but that they were each different people and we tried to do the best we could for each of them.   We all went upstairs and I read two more chapters in the book we were reading together.   After the reading was done, my daughter called the dog up on the bed for a goodnight hug.   While she was doing this I was giving my son a hug and said in a whisper, “I am so sorry it seems like dad and I get upset at you sometimes when your sister gets hurt.   It’s not your fault, it’s because dad and I are scared.   Your sister can only see a tiny bit out of one eye and her eye can be easily damaged and she could lose the only vision she has.”

My son was surprised by this, so I asked her for him: “let’s ask her.  Reese, can you see anything out of your right eye?”  She said no.   I asked her what she saw out of it and she said, “only black”.   My son knows a lot about his sister being blind, but in some ways he’s missing key parts of the picture even though he’s been with us through the whole vision journey.

I said to him more loudly this time, that I was sorry we got upset at him, that we just get scared when anything happens to his sister’s eyes, and that it absolutely didn’t mean we cared for her more.   He seemed to understand it.   Knowing him, he’ll be her biggest protector now.

The Big Boy Update:  I walked into school today with my son, carrying a tree branch with a basketball-sized wasps nest on the end.   It was an impressive specimen and frightening if you’re afraid of wasps.   My father brought it over for the children.   He’s had the nest in his shed for about ten years.   It was beautiful.   His classmates were all interested when we came into the classroom with it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My mother took my daughter to the mall today.   They were playing on the internal play ground when a mother and her daughter showed up.   My daughter asked her her name and age. She answered “Amelia, and 5 years old.” They played for a minute or two and then my daughter said “I’m blind. Do you know what that means?”  This is the first time I’ve heard my daughter talking about being blind to another child like this.   She’s processing the vision loss and accepting it in a way she hasn’t done before.   The vision loss is trauma, and one that’s repeated again and again as she’s lost more vision and had to endure more medical things surrounding it.   That she can talk about it now and not avoid the subject, even when we try to talk to her about it, is a very good sign.