Dear Lady on the Treadmill

Today I exercised beside you in the gym both of us striding on our treadmills. You told me all about your beautiful daughter and your shidduch search to find the very best husband for her. I heard all about the handsome boy from a well-to-do family and about his scoliosis and his limp that makes him as you said “walk funny.”

“Why should my daughter have to settle?” you loudly proclaimed. “She’s beautiful!”

I went home and looked at my own beautiful daughter. She’s funny determined and at the top of her class. I thought about her scoliosis and about her battle with cancer that caused it. I thought of the four surgeries she endured and the endless physical therapy sessions. I thought about the years we were terrified that she would never be able to walk on her own because that was the future the doctors envisioned for her.

And I thought about her first steps how each was a gargantuan struggle. Even now years later she often has a hard time doing the physical things so many of us take for granted.

As I sat and thought she stood up and walked across the room —  with a limp with a gait that you’d no doubt dub a “funny walk.” And I realized that what makes my child so wrong to you — what makes her something you’d be “settling for” — is exactly what makes her so right to me.

Her bravery her strength her courage and her perseverance are true beauty. A child who was never meant to make it. A mother who was told “If she lives she’ll never walk again.” A little girl who climbed a set of stairs during her physical therapy session over and over struggling and in pain so she could climb the slide at the park with her friends. What could be more beautiful and admirable than that?

Beauty — true beauty — comes from within. When looks have faded and youth is gone... these are the traits that stay.

It seems to me that the world is filled with people like you people who can’t see that outer beauty is fleeting and that it’s what’s inside of us — our spirit our convictions our efforts — that make us special and worthwhile. People like you who would discount my child because her legs work differently than yours.

You are discounting so much. You are discounting her grace her courage her perseverance her positive attitude during trying times.

I wonder if you will ever grow enough to realize that someone different on the outside is the same as you and your beautiful daughter on the inside. Will you ever know that a perfect exterior means nothing about what’s inside someone? No one can be better proof of this than you. As you walked on a treadmill with your perfect able legs your lips cut straight through to someone else’s heart.

And maybe that handicap is worse than someone else’s funny walk.

The Lady on the Other Treadmill