A Father's Story

There's nothing wrong with a little curiosity from time to time. There's nothing wrong with the occasional question, "what's the frame for?", or "why does he use that?". But there's curiosity and sheer rudeness and unfortunately the latter sometimes predominates.

Paula and I were determined to make the most of our son's new found mobility, so everywhere we went we took him in his Kaye frame as much as possible. Apart from the fact that he regularly fell out of it, a problem solved by using a baby walking harness until he grew to big for it, the problems we faced were nothing to do with mobility problems. They were the idiots who would stop and stare, or whisper to each other as he passed. You'd often hear the words "zimmer" or "that looks fun", but as soon as you caught their eye the perpetrator would look the other way. I can only be thankful that this all occurred at a time in our son's life when he was too young to notice. Occasionally a more direct approach resulted in a question about the frame which were only too happy to answer, in the interests of education, but we were always aware that people noticed his frame rather than his handsome good looks or cheeky personality. The exception to this was on holiday in Crete, where we found the local people were exceptionally friendly and seemed to not notice his frame or other special needs. It was a wonderful antidote to the difficulties of life elsewhere.