She used to like to ride her bike around the neighborhood, but she seldom leaves her house anymore. Instead, she plays solitary card games in the safety of her room.
When she ventures outside, the neighborhood children taunt her.They used to be friends - when the children were about kindergarten age. They'd come to her door and ask her to play. They'd color together. They'd laugh and talk a little.
As they got older, the children realized she was different. She has mental retardation.
It somehow wasn't enough for these youngsters just to withdraw their friendship she craved. Now they go out of their way to make her feel bad. They make fun of her weight, of her mind, of her.
When she was in school, she had friends. Now that she's 22 and no longer eligible for public school, her world has shrunk. Her companions are her mother and her teenage sister. And very young children who come to her house to color and talk and play.
But she's becoming more cautious around them. She's had other young friends. Now they taunt her.
Perhaps it is an immutable law of nature that children go through cruel phases. I don't think so, though. I think it's a learned behavior. Few infants start out mean. They are trained, usually without intention or malice, to be that way by the example of the people around them.
When I was growing up, my mother had a friend who had an empty eye socket, moles that sprouted bristly dark hairs and extremely crooked teeth. Because my mother is blind, she never noticed how Alice looked. So we didn't, either, although we were curious about why some people had one eye and some had two.
A few years ago, I interviewed a young man who had been in an explosion that destroyed his face. He had a number of surgeries and wore a pressure mask, called a Jobst, to reduce the scarring.
Before his accident, he was welcomed everywhere as a bright, handsome, articulate young man. After the accident, everything changed. Once, when he went into a video store to return some tapes, the clerk screamed and threw himself on top of two customers to "protect" them from the robber.
He was still the bright, articulate young man, but no longer handsome. He was different now and therefore subject to any rude or obnoxious reaction people decided to express.
He said the reaction he dreaded the most was when people looked past him, erasing him completely by failing to acknowledge him. He didn't like stares, but he could kind of understand them, he said. He'd probably done that to others in the past, to his regret. If people said something rude, he could correct them. Though often hurtful, at least that was something he could meet head-on.
He hated it when a child would say, "Daddy, what's wrong with his face?" and the parents would "shush" the child. He wasn't ashamed of the explosion. He was willing to explain. Perhaps, if he did, the child would grow up with more tolerance and acceptance of the fact that there are all kinds of people with all types of lives. Maybe that child would just accept it and pass that understanding on to the next generation of children.
That interview reminded me of a conversation between my mom and my nephew, who was about 5. When a new family moved in next door, Kenny burst into the house with a squeal of excitement. "Grandma, I just met the new neighbors and they're really nice and the daddy doesn't have a leg," he panted.
"Kenny, don't say anything about that to him," Mom admonished. "It's not polite."
"But Grandma, he knows about it," Kenny said, his voice clearly puzzled.
He does indeed. Trust a young child to understand that we build artificial barriers in relationships all the time, as we wonder how to handle anyone who's a little different from us.
Integration is always hard, whether it's moving an Italian family into an Irish neighborhood, forging racial tolerance or learning to accept people who have disabilities. Most of the barriers are made of ignorance, not malice. We tend to avoid anything with which we are not quite familiar or comfortable.
That's why integration is important. Schools that have welcomed children with disabilities and put them into general population have reaped rewards of understanding and acceptance that will make life better for everyone. Students with mental retardation can't always go into general classrooms because of their intellectual level of function. But that doesn't mean the other students can't serve as aides, mentors, friends, whatever.
We need to talk about the ways that we are different, so we can discover the ways in which we are all the same.
If we can ever learn to do that, a 22-year-old woman-child will not have to be afraid to ride her bike through her neighborhood.