Rachel Bitmead is a great mother who provides her children lovingly. And she blogs about their life as so many do. But there is one thing that makes Rachel’s family stand out: their constant battle against complete strangers’ prejudice.
How in the world that it happens? You might ask yourself, as you scrolling through their beautiful family pictures—the children take after Rachel with blond locks and big blue eyes, they all are clean and well dressed and they look healthy. And that’s the problem which Rachel addresses in her open letter regarding judging others without really knowing anything about their lives.
Strangers in the streets judge Rachel’s parenting and what they consider to be spoiling the child as they see Rachel’s five year old daughter whom she calls lovingly “Miss M” in a stroller.
Miss M is very neat and pretty in her dresses and cute bows in her long and silky blond hair. She looked grumpy and generally in a bad mood—like a child that did not get that extra scoop of ice cream. But Miss M is not a normal, healthy child as she may seem. She is tortured by a condition that is invisible to the outsiders who start randomly judging her, not knowing of the pain she battles everyday.
Miss M’s condition is widely unknown to the greater public – joint hypermobility syndrome, and so it brough along a nasty side effect: random judgement from other.
The syndrome causes weakness and tiredness from even simple everyday tasks and small amounts of movement like walking down the street. Miss M’s joints are more likely to dislocate, her muscles tend to get stiff really easily and after a short amount of time, she would get dreadful pain.
So medication and strong pain killers are a regular necessity for the pretty 5-year-old.
Rachel finally had enough: of telling people each and every time that no, her daughter was not a severe case of laziness, but actually really brave for having it made out of the house that day—this wasn’t something she wanted to have to do every time; of telling people who were whispering and sighing and clearly judging behind her back whilst passing that her child was in excruciating pain.
The individuals never addressed Rachel directly, but she—and even worse, her daughter—would hear the whispers and knew something was up: people would say that Miss M was too old to be pushed by her mother. So in retaliation, Rachel wrote an open letter to all those people.
It is clear that her words came from the bottom of her heart, and she gave a detailed explanation for her daughter sitting in a stroller rather than using her seemingly healthy legs herself. Rachel kindly talked the readers of her heartwarming letter through the condition her daughter was suffering from, the side effects such as immense pain in the lower half including joint pain in the hips as well as the actual legs and feet. The summery weather with the temperatures rising did Miss M no favor by adding up to the little child condition and intensifies the pain. Judging others is easy when you yourself are healthy and ablebodied.
Rachel also mentioned that she herself was no longer able to carry her daughter as she has reached a weight which cannot be carried for longer periods of time. Furthermore, the loving mother shared the fact that overexercising actually made the condition worse and ends in huge therapeutic backlashes. And it has occurred in the past days, which urged Rachel to write intense words to all those strangers who constanly judge her family.
Little Miss M’s body is weaker than the bodies of healthy children and as her hip joints do not allow her to wrap her legs around her mother’s caring body, she cannot be lifted in a manner that other people might be used to. As all these symptoms add up, the pain and the weakness tired the girl out very often. But those outsiders did not know that.
“So the next time you see a child in a stroller and think he or she looks “too old” to be in it, don’t judge or assume the child or parent is lazy.” Bitmead wrote “Don’t whisper behind the parent’s back or frown at either of them”.