My husband's attitude changed. He played football in the army. We have a lot of relatives whose kids play football and are good enough to get football scholarships. When I was pregnant with my son my husband and I picked out a name that we thought sounded like a good name for a football player. My husband was so ready to teach him all about sports, fishing, camping, fixing cars, working in the yard, all kinds of guy things they could do together.
But when our son was being born and that monitor showed that his heart rate slowed way down and then stopped we both forgot about any of that and just prayed that our son would live. When he started reading at two and talking a lot we were very very happy that his mild disabilities only affected him physically and there was a chance he would get better, but it was very unlikely that he would be able to do sports.
Thirteen years later he is getting lead roles in musical theater and doing well in spite of his mostly invisible disabilities. Because he loves to read about history, science, psychology, sociology, music, classic literature, technology, and is good with computers and video games, he looks, talks and acts like a geek but his dad is very proud of him.
Even though we are both very proud of him, it is not socially acceptable to be a geek where we live and this is hard to live with sometimes. One of the writers for our local paper wrote about this problem and said when she was in high school in our small town the band, choir and drama students felt like outcasts even in their own families. My son says he felt shunned by people in our community. The writer for the newspaper said she interviewed some people in our town who said they were very interested in the arts, but did not dare publicly explore them.
One family member recently posted something about Justin Bieber, saying he was "gay" and he said you could tell just by looking at him. Some family members think this about any boy who sings and dances. The family member who made the inappropriate comment is almost 40 years old. They use that word "gay" a lot here.
