"Mommy, He's Scared of Me!"

Lukasz on Dusty at Coffee Creek Therapeutic Riding Center.
He goes with his school every other week. Can you tell he LOVES it?

We had an experience two weeks ago in which Lukasz realized for the first time that a child was crying and screaming because of his face.  We knew this time was coming but his response was nothing like any of the scenarios we had tried to anticipate.  We should have. His response was exactly in line with his troublemaker, contrary personality.

Lukasz started school on August 20 at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf regional pre-K at UCO.  His brother Padraig started pre-K at our neighborhood school on Aug. 19.  So on Thursday, I decided that since it was finally just the three of us we would go to lunch at the fast food place Padraig is always begging to go to.  INSIDE.  And play at the playground.  Usually, we just go through the drive0-thru for obvious reasons (i.e. I do not want to lose my mind eating out with five kids by myself).

The rule is we eat first then we play.  So they both ate everything as fast as they could and ran out to a very cramped indoor playground which had just enough room for two benches for parents and about a 5 foot by 5 foot floor area between the entrance to the climbing playlet and the exit of the tube slide.  There were about 6 small, pre-k and younger kids playing with 3 or 4 moms sitting at the benches.

Lukasz ran right in after Padraig, ripped off his shoes and followed him up the play tower.  There was the expected hushing of kids in the play tower when I knew they were seeing Lukasz and I heard Padraig say, "That's my brother, he just has one eye and one ear."  And later, "He was just born that way."

A three-ish year old can sliding down the slide and ran over and sat net to his mom on a bench.

I have come to a natural habit of scanning a room, assessing the number of kids and mentally preparing myself for responding to innocently curious questions, stares and the occasional terrified crying and screaming.  Everything was fine until, Lukasz came down the slide the first time.  That's when the three year old burst into terrified crying and screaming.

Lukasz ran right past him and back up into the tower.  The boy calmed down.  Lukasz came down and the screaming started again and stopped when he was out of sight.  His mom knew what the problem was too and she was very frustrated with him.  I told her that it was normal for some kids.  Lukasz looks different and some kids can't help it.  She was apologetic but I told her it didn't bother me, I know he's not trying to be hurtful.

This continued four or five times until Lukasz stopped and noticed the boy crying.  He looked at me and signed, "He's crying, mommy."  I said, "I know, honey, he's ok." Then, before I could stop him, he decided to run over and try to give him a hug.  The screaming/crying reached a new height and I ran over and pulled Lukasz away.  He looked over at the boy and went up in the tower.

This time when he came down, he got out slowly and noticed when the boy started crying.  He ran over to the tower and saw that the boy started to stop.  Then he ran towards him and he started again. Lukasz did this again and then stopped, looked at me, and smiled the biggest, crooked smile I have ever seen and said, "Mommy, he scared of me!"  He thought it was funny!

I told him he was scared because he looked different.  Lukasz responded by pointing to his eye and scar from the skin tag surgery.  He wanted to go over and make friends but the little boy was too scared.  Lukasz went back to playing.

Lukasz clearly knew what was going on and what it was about his face that made it happen but he wasn't bothered by it at all.  I hope that this is the "whatever, I think I'm pretty great" attitude we work so hard to encourage him to have about his appearance and any response it gets.  I know it's too much to ask for him to never be hurt that people respond this way sometimes but if he can avoid getting hurt half the time, we'll take it.

A sister that dresses him up in her clothes, her dolls' clothes and old baby clothes she finds in our closets (she did this to Padraig when he was 3, too).  He's such a good sport about that and enjoys getting the laughs from his family.