How My Toddler Understands Blindness

Some daddies are blind, but some daddies are also not blind. Even some MOMMIES ARE BLIND! DID YOU KNOW THAT????

Hear me (and my toddler) read this post on the Deep Sy podcast!

I was walking down a sidewalk in Manhattan when a kid who sounded like he was about 12 asked, unprompted, “Can you see a little bit?”

He was about ten feet in front of me, standing next to another kid. He sounded polite, and his question was familiar. At the time, I used a white cane, but I had some residual vision and large glasses. People sometimes asked how much I could see to calibrate instructions they wanted to give me about getting around some obstacle.

“Yep, I can see a little. What’s up?” I said.

Without saying anything else to me, he turned to his friend, and his tone transformed instantaneously.

He yelled, “SEE, I TOLD YOU! THAT’S WHY HE’S GOT GLASSES, STUPID!”

His friend said nothing. I laughed as I passed them. Turns out, helping me was not top of this kid’s mind.

As I alluded to in a recent post, kids are my favorite people to talk with about blindness. They have absolutely no sense of what is or isn’t appropriate, and no one expects them to. Unlike adults, their ignorance doesn’t make my life harder. It makes my life more entertaining.