While, yes, I was awash in positive vibes today, I also had an experience this afternoon which bears talking about, and which reminded me that I've had a few experiences this week that screamed OMG! this culture is full of poisonous messages! So let's examine them in reverse chronological order, shall we?
This afternoon I had a little six year old patient. She was an adorable little girl--I mean TV-commercial level adorable, and the fact that she was missing her two front teeth only added to it. She happened to be Dominican. Her slightly older brother was with her, and he was a complete chatterbox, watching everything I was doing and peppering me with questions and commentary until his father forcibly removed him to the waiting room saying, "Will you let her work?!" (He really wasn't bothering me, honestly.) But in the course of his chatter, he told me he wanted to have blond hair, and his little sister said she did too. The little girl's hair was long, very very loosely curly, and absolutely gorgeous. "Why do you want it blond?" I asked her. "It's better!" she said. "No!" I said, "Your hair is beautiful!" Her brother picked up a strand of her hair and demurred. "Her hair is wrinkly!" I told them, again, no, that her hair was wavy and that it was so, so pretty, but I don't think I sold it. But how sad is that? At their tender ages they already had soaked up some kind of message that one kind of hair was the best, and furthermore, that kind of hair--blond and straight--is one that no one of their ethnicity was gonna come by naturally. Now, I know little kids get all kinds of strange ideas that hopefully they grow out of. At her age, as we've already established, I thought my name should be Isobel Rose and that if my mother wasn't so mean, she'd let me wear my orange and purple paisley dress every day, and I grew out of that. Though, frankly, if I had an orange and purple paisley dress now, I'd rock the hell out of it. But, yeah, sad anyway. This absolutely beautiful little six year old has already internalized that there's something about her appearance that's "wrong."
Next. The other day on the bus there was a woman with a toddler in a stroller, and the baby kept throwing its bottle onto the floor. The mother's reaction was, and I quote, "You better stop that! You're fucking embarrassing me!" I would have pointed out that, no, she was embarrassing herself by swearing at a baby, but honestly? She looked like she would probably cut a bitch. Y'all seen Precious? Um, yeah. I guess we can all just hope that life follows fiction and that that baby will miraculously grow up able to actually love someone.
And earlier in the week. I was behind an older teenage girl in the pharmacy line at CVS the other night. Her boyfriend was waiting with barely disguised--or maybe undisguised--impatience to the side in the "waiting" chairs. As I walked up, she was saying, "WHAT did you just call me?" Apparently he was disagreeing with a cell phone conversation that she'd just had with her mother. Luckily, I missed what it was that he did call her. For the next five minutes I watched as she tried to get him to pay attention to her, almost desperately, as he texted away and answered her in monosyllables and just wouldn't engage. At one point she said, "What is your problem?!? You act like you don't care what I'm saying!" I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and say, "Jesus Christ on a cracker, sweetheart, he doesn't! What the fuck are you doing tap dancing for this idiot's attention? He isn't worth it. You don't sound like you're exactly the next coming of Einstein, but you're seventeen and you're fairly pretty and your body's probably never gonna look this good again, so at this point you could at least get a guy who *pretends* like he gives a fuck. Drop this loser!" I DON'T KNOW WHAT WE DO TO GIRLS, BUT WE DO SOMETHING. Sigh.
Oh, well. I just heard on ESPN that Ubaldo still lives with his mother. I suppose that means he doesn't need me to be his surrogate mom, make him a nice steak and some brownies, and tell him he's a good boy and I'm proud of him, but it makes me love him all the more.
xoxo
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