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Parenting Pearls
The Jewish Home | JULY 21, 2022 Parenting Pearls Seeing the Best in Others
By Sara Rayvych, MSEd
This week, I am doing a slightly different type of article. We are just beginning the Three Weeks, and this is a difficult time period for our nation. The irony has often been noted that we have a time of mourning and seriousness during the summer, which is generally a time of fun and excitement. It only seemed appropriate to take a slightly different turn in this week’s article.
It is important to point out that my sister and parents approved this article before going to print. It would be irresponsible for me to print anything personal without prior permission.
February 2022
This past February was my second time ever going to Florida; the first was when I was just a teenager. While for some this is a tri-annual event, I am not much of a traveler and was going just to visit my parents.
With two little ones next to me, I prepared to board a plane for the first time in more than a decade. I was unsure what to expect. I knew there was priority boarding for those traveling with children, but I didn’t know when that would be. I asked the staff and davened for divine assistance.
I saw a married couple stand up, looking prepared to board. They looked like they knew what they were doing, so I asked them about boarding with children. The wife told me that she couldn’t help me because they were boarding with an earlier group comprised of the elderly and medically sensitive individuals.
Realizing how healthy and strong they both looked, she felt the need to confide that her husband had just had major back or spinal surgery. Despite his robust posture, he was early in his recovery and not feeling comfortable. Clearly, she was concerned that others would mistakenly think they were faking a medical diagnosis in order to receive priority boarding.
I reassured her that I didn’t think she was lying, and I shared with her the story of my previous trip to Florida, over two decades prior. ents decided to take us to Florida, and we couldn’t be more excited. This was our one chance to see the famous state, and we were really looking forward to it.
Armed with a Polaroid camera, my mother took a picture of us each day to have a current picture of us in that day’s clothing. We slathered on sunscreen and grabbed water bottles. Along with these routine safety precautions, my parents had a greater health concern to address. My sister was a more medically sensitive child and had recently been in the hospital. She, too, was really looking forward to this big trip and didn’t want to miss out.
It was important to my parents that we enjoyed this special trip while also ensuring my sister’s safety. Upon the recommendation of the amusement park staff, my parents borrowed one of the park’s wheelchairs for her. The wheelchair was important for a number of reasons. The obvious benefit was that it provided my sister with a means to visit the entire park without exhausting herself. While she was physically capable of walking, she could easily risk overdoing herself walking throughout the park, waiting on lines, and exerting herself in the heat.
There was another less obvious reason for the wheelchair. The staff of the parks were trained to treat wheelchaired occupants with certain extra sensitivity. For example, rather than wait 45 minutes to an hour outside on the line being baked by the sun, wheelchair occupants were able to sit in the air-conditioned inner area at the front of the line. Even if they had to wait the entire waiting period for the rest of their party to arrive, the individual in the wheelchair (plus a parent) was able to sit in comfort as the rest of their family burned under the sun. Remaining in a climate-controlled area was crucial to my sister’s safety.
The basic act of renting the amusement park’s wheelchair made sure my sister was comfortable and safe, rather than overheated and dehydrated, chas v’shalom. Even if she could walk, it didn’t mean it was safe for her to do so for that length of time. It was a simple yet incredibly effective method.
Since most of you don’t know my sister, you wouldn’t know what an in-
credible amount of energy she had (and probably still has). She was a young child and sitting still was not in her nature. This was the same young lady that turned her IV pole into a scooter and flew down the hospital corridors on her makeshift vehicle. Lest you think she was up to mischief, I want to reassure you that an IV pole scooter was just the easiest means of transportation for her to go from room to room doing bikur cholim visits to the other children.
If you can imagine a child that turns an IV pole into a scooter now being asked to sit in a wheelchair you can picture the dilemma – a child full of energy being asked to keep still. She took breaks from her sitting position to walk and stretch, getting some of her energy out in a safe way. Whenever she needed to take it easy, she had the wheelchair easily accessible, and whenever she needed to move, she could do so. I’d like to point out that this system must have worked well because my sister was medically stable for the entire duration of the trip, baruch Hashem. As we trekked around the park, hot and tired, she still had the ability to remain relaxed and hydrated.
It was inevitable, but she still took us by surprise. One time, as we walked around the park, my sister safely parked in her moving throne, her energy got the best of her. She got out of the wheelchair – and in complete innocence – proceeded to do a few cartwheels before sitting back down. To this day, our family still remembers the dirty looks from the
park patrons who assumed we were simply taking advantage of the wheelchair policy and its benefits. In their minds, if she could do a cartwheel then she certainly wouldn’t need a wheelchair.
I told this story to the woman and her post-op husband and reassured them that I fully understood that someone could appear healthy yet have some unseen issue. It’s easy to judge and make assumptions yet harder to recognize that we only see a limited view of any particular individual’s life.
For some, the condition is medical; for others, it’s mental health related. I know some people that look to the unassuming eye as a fully functioning individual yet are suffering a debilitat-
ing mental health issue. Hashem made humans so complicated that we can never know what another person is going through. It’s easy to assume we know the answer, yet rarely are we correct.
We live in a world that easily judges, despite knowing that only Hashem judges alone. Rather than being able to fully focus on her husband’s recovery, this woman feared being judged by strangers. My parents did what was best for their daughter’s health yet those that were clueless thought they knew better.
As we enter The Three Weeks, we begin a period when we mourn together as a people for what we’ve lost, a loss caused by our separateness from each other, fueled by our assumptions that we know better than others and can judge.
As parents, we set the tone for our children and create the world we want them to grow up in. We can create a world of harsh judgment or one of understanding and acceptance. Let’s teach both our children and ourselves to look beyond what the eye sees and recognize that, like a locked building, we only see the visible exterior.
May we merit to judge favorably and create a world of peace and friendship. May we merit to soon see wheelchairs turn into cartwheels.
Sara Rayvych, MSEd, has her master’s in general and special education. She has been homeschooling for over 10 years in Far Rockaway. She can be contacted at RayvychHomeschool@gmail.com.
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