DEALING WITH THOSE WHO ARE "DIFFERENT"
This is a very interesting piece written by a woman who speaks openly about her confusion of how to deal with her daughter's friend and second cousin, who has various physical differences--but who also learns valuable, inspiring lessons once she deals with it openly and honestly.  Hat tip for finding it goes to our Facebook friend Karen Krausmann Ouellette; maybe you've seen this already, but if not, check it out--it's very interesting, and can help those of us with Moebius understand a bit more what those who don't have it are thinking when they meet us.  Note:  this is not a story about Moebius Syndrome; but the themes in it are relevant to us all:
"I hauled the suitcase to the bedroom upstairs and turned to our guest, our 12-year-old Jenny’s friend and second cousin, Dawnisha, better known as Dolly.

“You can choose,” I said. “A mattress on the floor, the hide-a-bed or the top bunk of the loft bed.”

“The top bunk, please,” Dolly said promptly.

I looked at her tiny frame and shortened arms. Oh dear, maybe I shouldn’t have offered.

“Can you climb up there OK?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she scoffed. “As long as I don’t wear my back brace.”

That’s right. She has scoliosis, too.

She began unpacking, scattering pajamas and dress-up clothes in a semi-circle on the floor. Jenny picked up a techy-looking white object about 4 inches long.

“Is this an MP3 player?”

Dolly laughed. “No! That’s my hearing aid case!”

Downstairs, Dolly rummaged through the Tupperware in the corner cupboard. “Auntie Dorcas, do you have a miniscule container on hand? I need it for my vitamins.”

Oh yes. Food allergies. I had forgotten that as well. But — “miniscule?”

I was in for an interesting weekend.

They were born a month apart, these two. First Jenny, robust and red-haired and the youngest of five. Then my husband’s cousin and his wife had Dawnisha, a tiny, fragile firstborn, with only a three-fingered stub at her right shoulder and a somewhat longer arm on the left.

The girls had much in common as they grew older. Well-loved, talkative, creative and a bit precocious, they sang together in a children’s choir and canoed down the creek together and jumped on the trampoline and went to the state fair with Dolly’s family.

But having Dolly pop in and out of the house on summer afternoons was not like having her here for an entire weekend.

She is, I found, a combination of normal and gifted, of whole and handicapped, of stunted growth and oversized imagination.

I confess to never feeling quite sure about how to behave toward unusual others — minorities, disabled folks and so on — convinced that whether I stare or ignore, talk or keep quiet, it’s the wrong response.

A severely shy young friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that he had, that day, overcome his impediment enough to look at someone in a wheelchair and say hi. It seemed to me that the visible disability gave him the courage to briefly overcome his own less-obvious handicap.

A rapid online discussion followed. Some felt it was inappropriate to single out a disabled person as somehow safer. Handicapped people should be treated just like you’d treat anyone else, they said, and to even ask the question, “How should I treat a handicapped person?” was in itself an insult.

I could see their point. As a distinctly Mennonite woman in appearance, I don’t mind curiosity, but I dislike both reverence and mockery.

“Just like anyone else,” works for me, and if the lady beside me at the produce stand casually asks me if and how I cook acorn squash, I feel strangely affirmed as normal.

It wasn’t hard to treat Dolly as I would any 12-year-old guest. I indulged her love for my gluten-free cereal-and-peanut-butter bars and acted sympathetic, while chuckling inside, when she talked about symptoms of teenage hormones, prefaced by a nervous, “Are there any boys around?”

But sometimes there was simply no getting around the differences. A long-limbed, athletic girl like Jenny is different from one whose arms are like radio antennae that forgot to telescope all the way out.

When the zipper stuck on her jacket, Dolly simply didn’t have the leverage to fix it. Nor could she open the container of snack bars by herself.

Fortunately, Dolly herself taught me how she ought to be treated.

When she wanted a drink, I pointed to the right cupboard, then realized the glasses were up too high, so I set a step stool in place for her. I turned to work on something else and soon realized that even the step stool wasn’t high enough when Dolly said, “Is it OK if I kneel on the counter?”

Should I have simply fetched her drink myself, I wondered? Dolly answered my unspoken question, “Auntie Dorcas, just so you know, you don’t have to do things for me, even if it takes me a lot longer than you.”

I was glad to know that.

Children make things less complicated than adults, and I took cues from Jenny as well. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, the two girls crossed the road and played in the deep ditch and among the oak trees on the other side.

Eventually, they decided to dig steps into the dirt to make it easier to go up and down the ditch.

So Dolly stood at the top, her little arms wrapped around a large red shovel, and there she prodded and pushed and tugged in what seemed to me a pitiful, useless effort.

At the bottom, Jenny pushed dirt aside with her hands, oblivious to Dolly’s slow progress. I checked on them once or twice and both seemed delighted with their project, the mud on their knees — and each other.

But I wondered why in the world Jenny didn’t see how Dolly was struggling with that shovel. I swallowed my motherly urges to rush in and direct them, sensing that it was best to take my cues from Jenny.

If the girls were happy, I should probably stay out of it.

They came in a long time later, glowing and muddy, totally satisfied with their afternoon’s work. I was the only one who had stressed about their arrangement; that was obvious.

“What’s the hardest thing to do?” I asked Dolly that evening, meaning: What normal task did she find most difficult?

She misunderstood. “When I see other kids playing sports.”

I considered saying, “Well, I can relate to that.”

But I knew that, in reality, I couldn’t. Not at all.

So young, so many losses, I thought.

And yet, in other ways, she had so much. She told me how it works with men like her dad and my husband.

“It’s like, with Smucker men, if you keep asking, they dig in their heels. You ask one time and then it’s quiet, and then after a while you say, ‘Uh, did you hear me?’ and they’re like, ‘I’m thinking.’ ”

So young, so wise, so hilariously observant, I thought.

She changed into pajama bottoms and a tank top for the night. I asked which joints of hers correlated with my wrists and elbows. She demonstrated, from shoulders to fingers, showing me which bones were missing, which joints moved and which didn’t.

“And this here is like an elbow, except it’s fused,” she said, pointing to her left arm. “I’m so glad it’s fused in a bend. If it were fused straight, I couldn’t comb my hair, or eat! Thank God he made me this way!”

And then, just like Jenny or any normal 12-year-old girl, that thought triggered another and she rattled down another track.

“Do you think that’s taking the Lord’s name in vain to just say, ‘Thank God?’ I mean, it’s not like I’m kneeling down and praying and, ‘Oh thank you dear God.’ It’s like, an expression, you know? ‘Thank God this and this!’ ”

I told her I’m sure it’s all about how you mean it in your heart.

Then she and Jenny galloped on in seemingly endless chatter about pajamas and dreams and library books and cats and cute clothes and brothers and making stuff. She really is just like any other girl, I thought. Except when she’s a lot more so.

Or, as Dolly herself put it, with a delighted grin, “Capable but humble, that’s me!”

"You can't let one bad moment spoil a bunch of good ones."
-Dale Earnhardt