Once upon a time Skylar was not yet two years old and I took him in with me for a WIC appointment. Now, the WIC nurses where we were living at the time were mighty different from the ones in Columbia, so I'd like to emphasize that this does not imply anything about WIC nurses in general and that it certainly doesn't relate to the ones here. This particular WIC nurse was pretty short with people as a matter of course. She had already been nasty to me and to Skylar enough times that I thought of her privately as WICked.
On this particular day, she was angry at Skylar, because after she had told me that finger pricks don't hurt, and that only kids who are old enough to expect them to hurt even cry, and that Skylar would therefore not, he had cried upon receiving one. Now, he was gripping his bandaided finger while sitting in my lap. His bandaided middle finger. Well, this woman got into her head that he was quite deliberately showing her that particular finger- again, this child who was still not even fully verbal, was taking advantage of the fact that his middle finger was the one pricked in order to have an excuse to make a rude gesture.
So, she called him over, and took his bandaid off, and gave it to him, and told him to put it in the garbage. When he just looked at her, she repeated the order. She would not listen to me explaining that he knew the word 'trash', not 'garbage'. She just kept insisting to him that he must go put it in the garbage, it was only giving him an excuse to cry and be bad, he'd cried long enough, go put it in the garbage.
(I'll divert for a second to say, I should've gotten up and walked out and placed a complaint at some point during this, but I wasn't aware enough or assertive enough at the time to do so.)
So, anyway, she later informed me that he seemed to be delayed, because a child his age should be able to follow simple commands like 'throw it in the garbage'. Skylar normally threw trash away when told, but again, she refused to listen to the fact that he just hadn't been exposed to the word 'garbage'.
Anyway, my point here is not that the WIC nurse was an utter bitch.
My point is how easy it is, if you don't care enough to look beyond the surface, or listen for a second, to confuse lack of exposure to certain information with stupidity or slowness. How easy it is to decide someone is beneath you or lacking in some way, because they don't know some minor fact you personally take for granted. I've watched for this in people since, and it happens a lot- you see that I don't know the name of the new computer program, and therefore you assume I don't know how to go online, or you see that I'm not familiar with a certain book or movie and assume I'm ignorant of the whole subject. It happens an incredible lot to kids.
The funny thing is,Skylar is really bright. Like, not just I'm-his-mom-so-I-think-he's-smart bright, but honest-to-goodness exceptional, frighteningly exceptional. And yet, if I took him back and let him carry on a conversation with that same woman today, she'd never be able to see it, even if he talked to her about algebra and science and what he's been reading lately, because she saw that one word he didn't know, and she made up her mind.
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