NLDline

 
Overlooking Blindness

Mary and I were at the park when a mother and her two children came. I could tell almost immediately that the older child was blind. He sat down in the sand and started playing. Mary went up to him, picked up his sand pails and asked him if she could play. While playing, Mary never recognized that he was blind. She would talk with him and never noticed that he did not "look" at her. She would say "look at..." and did not notice that he was feeling it instead of
looking at it. At one point, after about 10 minutes, she moved to another spot in the sand and asked him to come over. He made his way over to where she was, thanks to her non-stop talking, and she did not notice his arms being out and that he did not walk directly to her. His brother and she were playing on the adaptive swing and he felt his way over to where they were and started pushing her by holding the chains instead of pushing with his hands from behind. While he was pushing her she stood up in the chair. He did not react to her standing up. She did not notice the way he walked over to them, that he was not pushing the swing like other children push it and that he did not see that she was standing up in the swing.

After about 30 minutes of playing with him and his brother, she wanted them to go to the swings across the park. She started to run over to them. I stopped her and suggested that she offer to hold his hand. When she asked why I told her that he couldn't see well. She asked me "How do you know?". I told her that his mother told me and his mother said that he didn't make eye contact. His mother's statement hit me like a bag of bricks. It was then that I fully understood that she is almost completely unable to read body language. 
Elizabeth  (Mary 6 - NLD, ADHD, depression)