As I slowly made peace with both my strengths and my limitations as a mother, I also gradually became ready to learn how to create healthy boundaries between myself and the world around me. Again, my sweet son would help me learn what I needed to know.
In the summer when Luke was a toddler, I’d put on our bathing suits and my peg leg, the leg I use in the water, and take us to one of Seattle’s parks to play in the wading pool. After spreading out our blanket, I’d get out the sunblock and slather his plump little body with lotion. Resisting like a greased pig, he’d try to squirm away, his eyes on the wading pool.
The first time we went, just as I knew would happen, I felt their eyes prickling my back. As Luke and I made our way across the grass to the pool, their whispers tickled my ears. I fully expected the looks and the whispers. What I didn’t expect was that eventually they would begin to emerge, like the munchkins rising from the plants in the Land of Oz, to peer closely at my leg. Just like Dorothy, I was seen as unusual. Children didn’t often see someone like me. My peg leg, attached to an otherwise normal-looking mom, made me unique. I looked like half suburban mother, half pirate. I walked with the stiff-legged swagger of Captain Ahab. And they couldn’t resist.
“Go ahead and ask her,” I heard one mother whisper to her child.
The little girl, along with some other children, approached me. Some of them were tentative; others came forward with unabashed confidence. But by the time I reached the pool and stepped into the water, there were about six children surrounding Luke and me. Standing in the middle of the wading pool, they peppered me with questions, and each seemed to mirror the personality of the child.
“Eeww, what happened?” asked a cute little girl in a tone of disgust. God, I hate feeling judged by a child, I thought as I composed my answer in my mind.
“I was in a car accident, and my leg got banged up, so the doctors had to take it off,” I replied in a gentle voice.
“Did the car go crash?” asked a grungy little boy who was probably reluctant to leave his tractor in the dirt pile when his mom had called him in to get ready to go to the park.
“Yes, the car went crash.”
“Was there a whole lot of blood?” asked a more timid child, who actually seemed concerned.
“Yes, there was blood, but the doctors made the bleeding stop.”
“Did it hurt?” another wondered.
“Yes, it hurt, but I’m okay now. It was a long time ago.”
“Did you cry?” This from a little boy who was probably trying to gauge how bad it was. If I cried, it was bad.
“Yes, I cried.”
And then a brave child ventured, “Can I touch it?”
Before I could think, I said, “Sure. See, it’s hard because it’s made of plastic. I can’t even feel you touching me.”
After the children took turns touching my leg, squealing as if they’d just gotten away with something sneaky, they slowly dispersed. A few lingered, assuming Luke and I would play with them. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by ignoring them, so I half-heartedly attempted to engage with them. Luke tugged on my hand and looked up at me with pleading eyes. I took him to the park because I wanted him to be the center of my universe. Instead, and without inviting it, I had become the center of all these children’s universes for a few minutes. I looked at his face and felt like I had failed him.
As we drove home that afternoon, I realized that Luke had just heard the story of how I’d lost my leg for the first time. I’d had fantasies of telling him this story when he was older—in some very intentional way that would help him understand without making him feel scared. But I hadn’t known how to fend off the children at the park without hurting their feelings, so the story had spilled out. And now there it was.
There it was over and over again that summer, too. The same scene repeated itself every time Luke and I went to the wading pool. I felt the same discomfort every time. And every time, I looked at Luke’s face afterward and wished I had a way to tell the other children to go away.
On a hot day late that summer, as we were getting ready to go to the wading pool, Luke asked, “Mommy, can you stop talking about your leg at the park?” His request said it all. It told me he was tired of hearing the same questions and the same answers. He was tired of his mommy being singled out at the playground. He was tired of my divided attention.
I knew I was tired of the questions, too, but I didn’t know how else to handle them besides to answer. I tried to think back to my prying curiosity in my younger years with Linda, Becky, Rashid, and Gary—how I had wanted to know their stories so badly. They had kept their boundaries with me, had decided for themselves what they would and wouldn’t talk about. But I couldn’t remember how they’d done it. I only remembered my longing to find compatriots in my pain and the embarrassment I felt when I pried too deeply.
I couldn’t count on the children at the park to figure out that they were out of line. I’d need to learn how to draw boundaries for myself—and for Luke.
Later in the week, sitting across from Lynn in her office, I posed the question to her, “Can I stop answering the children’s questions?”
I saw the familiar twinkle in her eye when she knew we were onto something big. I still wanted an easy way out of uncomfortable situations, even after all this time of learning that life was often an uphill climb, but those eyes told me this one would require me to stretch my comfort zone.
“Why do you answer their questions?” she posed.
“Why? Because they ask.”
“Yes, but why do you answer?”
I paused to consider. Why did I answer them? Then it hit me. “Because I feel responsible to these children. I want to relieve their fear of people who look different. I want to prove to them I’m normal and not a freak.”
As we talked more, I remembered my youthful disgust of the boy in my high school choir class who had a deformed arm. I recalled my visceral fears and sick feelings about him and other people with missing body parts. Before my accident, a body with a missing part made me want to throw up. I didn’t want people to feel that way about me. So telling the story of my accident made me a real person, a victim who had no choice about what her body looked like, and not just some disgusting freak. I was still fighting my own disgust by trying to prevent others from feeling it about me.
And then Lynn said something that blew my mind.
“You know, you don’t have to answer their questions. You don’t have to take care of them or make them comfortable.” She went so far as to say, “It’s the children’s parents’ job to tell their children what happened and to help them manage their feelings.”
I considered this. “Well, I don’t want the parents coming up to me and asking all their questions.” That would be worse.
She suppressed a laugh. “No, they probably won’t. You just tell the kids to go ask their parents what happened.”
Whatever she was getting at still wasn’t sinking in. “But they don’t know what happened.”
She nodded, seeing I was struggling. “True. But all they need to know is that you lost your leg and you wear a prosthetic leg to compensate. That’s all the children need to know. And you don’t have to be the one to tell them that.”
Finally, a realization was coming over me like warm water in a shower. “You mean, I don’t need to be responsible for all these children?” Wow. I thought. Was she giving me permission to let other people deal with their own curiosity and feelings about my missing limb?
“Do adults ask questions about your leg, too?” She peered over her glasses.
“Yes, a lot.”
“Do you answer them?”
“Well, yes. I don’t want to be rude. I want to be nice.”
I had spent the last twenty years answering every single tactless question about my accident to avoid being rude to people. People didn’t seem to realize their questions, especially the persistent questions that dug deeper into the specifics of the accident, forced me to open up my precious little cargo bin of memories. Having been conscious during the entire accident, except for the one fraction of a second when my leg was severed, my memory of losing my leg was crystal clear. If I knew anything, I knew I couldn’t dwell on those memories for long without moving into a trauma response. At least once a week over the last twenty years some stranger asked me to recount that day. I could never talk about the accident without a little lump swelling up in my throat. And yet I couldn’t be rude, could I? So I perfected a glib attitude and a wave of my hand to dismiss how sad it was. I walked away from those brief encounters with strangers feeling my glibness was a betrayal of my tender self. I then had to put those memories back in the cargo bin and stuff them under the bed of my heart after each encounter.
Lynn pointed out how ludicrous adults’ questions were by giving me an alternative reply: “I’ll tell you all about the worst day of my life if you tell me about the worst day of yours.”
That stopped me dead in my tracks. My first reaction was complete resistance—there was no way I could say that to anyone. I pictured myself answering people’s questions with her provocative answer instead of engaging in a five-minute conversation with them and I started to giggle nervously.
Maybe I could do it. Maybe I could really set this limit and claim my boundary. The pit of fear in my stomach told me it wouldn’t feel natural to talk to people that way, but the relief and freedom I felt just thinking about the possible results made it clear that some kind of boundary had to be my next step. I left my session with a promise to Lynn and to myself that I would practice a handful of phrases I could use to set boundaries. I was determined to protect both myself and Luke from other people’s sometimes well-meaning, but often detrimental, curiosity.
When I decided I wasn’t going to answer any more questions, I felt big and powerful and small and scared all at the same time. While doing the dishes or folding the laundry, I practiced my responses for both children and adults.
“I’m here at the playground to play with my son. I’m sure your mom or dad can explain.”
“I’ll tell you about the worst day of my life if you tell me about the worst day of yours.”
I finally understood that the children didn’t need the gory details. Their own parents knew how much information to give and what language to use with their child far better than I did. I felt like my cells rearranged themselves in the course of one week once I adopted this new persona. There was a seismic shift in my attitude, in my understanding, about where my boundaries lay.
On the next hot day, I donned my shorts and took Luke to the park, ready to take the kids on. Come on, let me have it. Give me your best shot. I can handle even the most insensitive, asinine question.
We walked into the park, laid out our blanket, and applied the sunblock just like always. I glanced around me at the other park patrons. Not one whisper. We played in the wading pool. No one came up to us. We walked over to the playground. No one asked a single question. There were a few stares, which was normal and expected, but not one question. I was disappointed until I realized I’d gotten what I asked for: a peaceful trip to the park with my son. Was this a fluke or was I giving off different energy with my new resolve?
But a few weeks later, I would get to use these new boundaries. Mark and I took Luke to a park together on a Saturday. We were spinning on the roundabout when a boy about five years old ran up to us. “Hey, what’s that?” he asked, pointing at my leg.
“I’m at the park with my son right now. You can talk to your parents about it.” I scanned the park, but saw no other adults present. Is this boy here alone?
“They’re not here. Hey, what IS that thing?” He walked over to me as the roundabout slowed down. I saw his hand reaching out to touch my leg. I could see this child was going to make me work at it.
I got up and walked a few feet away. “I’m playing with my son right now. Here, I’ll spin,” I said, turning my attention to my family. And I began spinning the roundabout.
“Is that real? Hey, what happened?” I gave Mark a desperate look. This was the kind of child who might go on relentlessly, each question inspiring a new one. I didn’t want to jump on that merry-go-round, but I’d only practiced a few phrases.
Mark chimed in, direct and clear, “Stop asking questions.”
My shoulders relaxed and I breathed. Oh, so that’s how to do it. The boy, realizing I wasn’t going to bite, didn’t leave, but started talking about his new bike. I heard his dad, hailing him from across the park, to come home. We spent the next half hour playing peacefully, just the three of us.
If I were on a plane falling from the sky and all the air masks dropped from the overhead compartments, I wouldn’t first help everyone else to get their mask on, put on my own, and then finally put on my son’s. If I responded this way, he would be dead by the time I got to him. I realized that every time I answered someone’s questions, I’d been taking care of that person first, then taking care of my need to take care of them, and I’d been leaving Luke out in the cold. This wasn’t just a lesson in how to set my own boundaries; I found a deeper understanding of what it meant for me to be a mother.
My son comes first.