Our Real Life Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in our house who was very shy. She cried when strangers even looked in her direction and once begged to not be forced to wear her new dress on Easter morning because “People will talk to me if I’m cute.” After leaving the grocery store dozens of times carrying a hysterical girl to whom a stranger had dared to speak, we made a button for her to wear on her shirt that begged for them to leave her alone.

As she got older, her intense shyness persisted. She trembled at the thought of going to play at the park because there would be people there that she didn’t already know. As she turned five, she wistfully remarked that if she could have any superpower in the world she’d want to be invisible so that “no one would see me.”

Being seen by other people seemed to be physically painful to her. She would shrink behind the rest of us and begin to whimper as soon as she realized that she had been spotted. We encouraged her to learn to speak up and be heard, and she valiantly tried, but often failed.

a rare picture of my girl looking straight at the camera

It was only on the soccer field that she seemed to find confidence and not mind that other people were watching.

We moved to Texas, and she gulped down her fears and learned to not run in fear from the other kids she didn’t know. While she still wouldn’t initiate conversations by choice, she had come to understand that shyness can come across as rudeness and that girls who want friends have to be willing to talk to them….so she gulped down the fear and tried.

Then came arthritis and she could no longer hide. People don’t tend to ignore a 7-year-old with a cane.

In the whirlwind of sickness, she changed. I don’t know if it was the crowd of medical professionals who insisted on hearing from her, or that she had climbed the mountain of illness and chemotherapy and survived that changed the girl she was into someone brave and bold. I just know that she’s not the same person any longer.

This morning, a little more than two years after her toe swelled and our arthritis adventure began, she asked me to record her singing songs from Frozen to post on Facebook for a friend’s son to hear. She never worried about what other people would think, she simply sang her heart out….and her mom, who can remember the days when my sweet girl hid behind the security of a pink button that begged others to leave her alone, held her breath and wondered how on earth that this could be the same child….and thanked God for the blessings and trials that got us here.