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.

For instance, smaller children often want to play with my cane. They have no idea why I have it, but they don’t care. They just want it. Usually, they pound it on the floor or thwack a nearby wall.

Sometimes they guess what it’s for. One girl asked if it was a fishing rod. A boy wanted to know if it was a staff, “Like Gandolf” (I almost said “yes” to that one). Once, a kid a couple dozen feet away saw me walking with the cane and yelled, “Look! He’s got a metal detector!” He was thrilled.

In that instance, I didn’t hear the grownup explain what was really going on. But when I do, those conversations are also fun. Often the adult tries to get the child not to talk so loudly, or point, or ask questions. I try to convey to the kid that disabilities aren’t something to be weird about. Or, actually, that disabilities are something kids should be weird about because kids are weird about everything, and they shouldn’t discriminate. They should scream about my cane the same way they scream about ice cream, cars, animals, clouds, pizza, their own shadow, every single new thought they have, and so on.

So I tell the adult, “No worries, I’m happy to talk about being blind.” Then, they often listen to the conversation with as much interest as the kid, occasionally adding their own questions. My impression is they’ve never felt permission to ask before. Kids don’t care about permission. They don’t yet know they’re supposed to care about permission. And that cluelessness is what makes them so curious and teachable.

But it took me a while to understand the true extent of their teachability. Their perspectives can be light years from the mainstream if the circumstances around them are just slightly different than most people’s. A little over three years ago, my wife gave birth to our daughter, Emma. Since then, I’ve seen up close what can happen when a sighted kid grows up with a blind parent.

It is an understatement to say that Emma is a character. She’s a wildly social, goofy, curious, opinionated energy ball who is both instantly in charge of most rooms she enters, and, probably related, a head taller than most kids her age.

Sometime after she turned two, I decided it was time to explain why she was noticing differences between the way her mother and I do things. I told her that Daddy cannot see, like how she cannot see when her eyes are covered or we turn off the lights. I explained that this is called “blind,” and there are lots of blind people in the world. I kept reminding her of this information over the next week or so as she told me to look at things or referenced visual details around us.

About two weeks later, we had to have a conversation clarifying some points. We were talking about a friend of hers, who I’ll call Joe.

“Joe’s daddy is blind,” she stated with complete certainty.

“What? No he’s not.”

“Yeah, daddies are blind. “

“Ah, I see. Well, some daddies are blind, but not all daddies are blind.”

“Joe’s daddy is not blind?”

“No.”

“Oh, some daddies are blind, some daddies are not blind,” she repeated.

“That’s right,” I said. There were a few seconds of silence while she processed this new information. Then I added, “And some mommies are blind.”

“WHAT?!” she asked, like she had never heard such foolishness.

For Emma, my blindness was merely a fact. She had no sense that it was strange, or that she should feel anything in particular about it.

One day, she was eating a piece of salami, and decided the shape she had bitten it into looked like a seashell. She held it up for her grandma, who was on a video call, to see.

“Look!” she said excitedly. Then she turned to me and held it out. “Feel it, Daddy.”

I was almost overwhelmed with how naturally thoughtful this was. Without anyone instructing her, she adapted our interaction so I could be part of the conversation. It was adorable.

At the same time, I absolutely did not want to touch a piece of salami she had bitten and probably slobbered all over.

“Oh…” I said, doing my best to sound touched and hide my unease. “Yes. feel it. Mmhmm...” I decided to handle it for about a second, saying, “Wow, so cool!” and hastily handed it back.

But it wasn’t just the logistical realities of blindness she intuitively understood. The real shock for me was that she got the emotions too.

I used to take her to daycare in a baby carrier on my back. It’s a smart way to travel with a small child without vision that I learned from other blind parents. My white cane, as always, stopped me from running into or tripping over anything. And if something stuck out sideways above the level of my cane, it wouldn’t touch her because it would hit me first.

Nevertheless, I was initially nervous to try walking around this way. If you read my post about unsolicited sighted help in public, you’ll understand why. The amount of condescension, stress, and outright anger I receive from people on the street who incorrectly think I need their help is astounding. How much more of that would I get if there was a baby on my back?

What I didn’t count on was Emma’s personality (always count on Emma’s personality). In the carrier, she could suddenly see more of the world than ever before, and she was at eye level with grownups. She LOVED it. She spoke to most people who came near us, and often tried to interact with them in more ways than just talking.

Once, she was sitting in the carrier drinking a bottle. A woman was walking next to us on the sidewalk.

“I think your daughter is done with her bottle,” the woman said.

“Oh, thanks. How come?” I asked.

“Because she handed it to me,” said the woman, giving me the bottle.

I think Emma’s joy about her new perch, plus her constant conversations with me and other pedestrians, kept the unsolicited help to its normal amount.

But Emma seemingly started to notice that people were talking to me differently than they do to her mom, and that I was often trying to get out of these interactions quickly. I decided this must be what she was thinking when she was just shy of a year old. On the way to daycare, a woman started giving me instructions on how to cross a street I was already halfway across. I said “Okay,” in a tone I hoped would indicate I didn’t need further help. She gave more instructions. I repeated “Okay,” once or twice. She didn’t seem to notice my words at all. That’s when Emma chimed in.

“Okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay!” she said loudly to the woman.

The woman got the message. Luckily, she took it well. She belly laughed, and said “Alright, I hear you loud and clear, honey. Daddy can do this on his own.” Still chuckling, she walked away.

Emma and I turned off a main avenue onto a smaller cross street. There was no one around. We walked several seconds in silence. I was, admittedly, in my head. The woman wasn’t the first to provide unnecessary directions on that journey, which was only about 15 minutes total. I was tired and hadn’t had coffee. And at that point I was always, in the background, thinking about how Emma felt about the people who implied her dad probably couldn’t really take care of her. Ironically, all this meant I wasn’t paying much attention to Emma. But then, a little voice from my back shook me out of my thoughts.

“Dada… you sad?”

“Oh… what? Uh, no,” I said, trying to process. Is my 11-month-old checking in on my emotions? Does she know what just happened?

“You sad?” she repeated.

“Oh, honey, I’m okay. Thank you for asking. That lady thought I needed help, but I don’t. That’s okay.”

A couple more seconds of silence. Then I felt her little hands spread as wide as they could across my back, and the side of her face pressed between my shoulder blades. She was doing everything she could to give me a hug.

“I yuh you dada.”

“Well if I wasn’t going to cry before, I am now,” I thought.

“Oh, I love you too, honey,” I said, choking up.

I don’t precisely know what was going through her little head. But I’ve spent more of my time and energy than I can (or would want to) add up explaining to people that their assumptions about me are wrong and make me feel bad. The replies about their good intent, or the benefit of the doubt, or my stubbornness, or lightening up, or whatever, they are attempts to complicate the uncomplicated.

For Emma, nothing about it is complicated. Partially because she’s a child, sure. But also because she sees me every day. Many people are surprised at things I can do. Not Emma. The things I can do are simple and fundamental facts of her young life. What confuses her is everyone else’s doubt.

So the next time you see a blind person on the street, don’t get flustered. Be like Emma. Take it back to basics. Some daddies are blind. Some are not. The blind daddies can get around. If you say they can’t, they might feel sad. So just let them be.

If you see a blind mommy though, then it’s time to freak out. Blind mommies? Ridiculous!