A friend lent me the book Wonder with the caveat that I pass it on. The only problem is that she did not also hand me tissues. The novel is about a boy with disabilities. Severe facial abnormalities that set him apart and make it nearly impossible to make friends. The emphasis being on the word "nearly".
Auggie has
to ride the choppy waters of fifth grade as the new kid. Which you may recall can be tempestuous even for those who qualify as normal. It has been a few years since I held the pages in my lap, and am both eager and terrified to sit in the
theater to watch the movie with my family in a few weeks.
When I suggested a few days ago that our culture values looks above our very breath, I thought I was lapping the shores of hyperbole. Then a friend wrote me to say that her mother refuses to wheel around
her oxygen tank, because of how it appears. She would rather sustain her image than breathe.
I thought about corsets. Bound feet. Tight jeans. Suddenly it did not feel like such an outrageous comparison.
The impact of Wonder is that a boy can break free of the stigma around what he looks like. Which liberates all of us.
The subject matter is of course not purely hypothetical for us, having tried
to protect our son from the jeers and leers that follow anyone who has not and will never read the How to Fit In Socially manual. Still it will give me the opportunity to observe a couple who are parenting a special needs child. In the off chance that I have stumbled in that regard.
