There was once a girl.
Often there are girls. All over the world, girls are born every day, every hour, every moment. You might even be a girl. So girls are nothing new.
I would like to say that this girl was something new. Something the world had never seen before. But she wasn’t. She was a normal girl, an everyday kind of girl. She was ordinary. Her hair was a particularly ordinary shade of light brown and her eyes were an everyday shade of blue. She liked to play with other girls her age and help her mother bake cookies. She liked to draw with her crayons and markers and her mother put her drawings up on a corkboard so everyone could see. She played with dolls but preferred the company of her stuffed animals, but this didn’t make her different or unusual. She was very ordinary.
At least, the part of her that everyone saw was ordinary. Underneath her light brown hair and behind her blue eyes, though, she was far from ordinary. She was unique, unlike anyone else. She was special. Behind her blue eyes, her stuffed animals and dolls took on life and danced for her while her mother was away. In her head, the grass was blue and the sky was purple and the sun blazed an unusual shade of green. Because this girl was special.
Sometimes, being special was hard. People laughed at her. They said that the sun wasn’t green and the grass wasn’t blue and she was silly for saying so. They said that her dolls and toys didn’t dance, that they just sat there or moved when she moved them herself. They said she was a silly little girl because the world didn’t look to them the way it looked to her.
It hurt to be told that she was silly. The girl took her toys and her drawings and stopped telling people about what the world looked like to her. She stopped telling them about what happened behind her blue eyes and under her light brown hair. And she was sad because she liked sharing her world.
One day, her mother noticed that there were no new drawings for the corkboard. She noticed that the girl’s toys were in their toy box and not all over the living room. She noticed the girl sitting very quiet and very still in her bedroom. “What’s the matter?” the girl’s mother asked.
“The sky is blue,” the girl said. “I saw it today. And the sun is yellow.” She looked up at her mother and a tear trickled down her cheek. “And the grass is green. They’re all right. Then it must be true.”
“What must be true?” her mother asked and sat next to her on the bed.
“That I’m silly,” the girl answered and another tear trickled to her chin. “And I’m wrong for drawing green suns and blue grasses and purple skies. I’m nothing but a silly girl.” And she started to cry.
Her mother sighed and held the girl in her lap and stroked her hair. “You’re more than a silly girl. You’re my girl and just because someone says that the sky is blue and the sun is yellow doesn’t make it true. You’re my special girl and you see things the way nobody else does. They say you’re silly because they don’t understand.” When the girl looked up, her mother wiped her tears away with a tissue. “You’re my special girl and I love you. I miss your drawings and your laughter and your dancing toys.”
“Can I draw for you?” the girl asked and her mother smiled, “You can always draw for me. No matter what color the sky is or what color the sun is or what color the grass is, I’ll always put your drawings on the corkboard. I’ll always love you and listen to your stories.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
The girl stopped to look at her mother’s light brown hair and blue eyes. And then she smiled, “Will you draw with me?”
“Only if you don’t mind if my sky and grass and sun are different colors,” her mother answered. Her blue eyes twinkled like stars as she whispered, “Because I’ve always thought the sun looked better blue.”
 RosieRuth · Tue Oct 31, 2006 @ 07:56pm · 0 Comments |
