So in my previous post I mentioned a long line for a ride that Number 3 insisted on. We had just come back into the Park after taking a break for dinner, and we were trying to pick rides that we had never gone on. After a few minutes in line, we realized that this particular ride was probably a mistake. The line was long. The line was slow. Only a few people could go on the ride at a time. It was sort of excruciating. But a few pivotal things happened.
The first, was mentioned previously. The Little One picked it, and insisted, and we obliged. The second, was that we saw another kid with Alopecia. Looking over early on in the long wait, I happened to see a little boy, a few years older than our Middle Kid with a bald head, marked by a few small patches of shaved hair. It made me catch my breath.
About one year ago, we made a trip to Disney after our five-year old’s first hospital stay and his head looked exactly the same. We immediately made contact and started talking to the mother. Through a combination of french and english, she explained that the doctors didn’t know what it was, but that they thought it was a reaction to a shock – she was a recent cancer survivor. (A common trigger for Alopecia is shock and stress.) We pulled the Middle Kid’s hat off of his head and explained that he had the same thing and one year before looked exactly like her son. She had never heard the name of it before. Our two boys did the “exploding nucks” anytime they saw each other in line after that.
And finally, about half-way through the line, I realized there were a couple of kids trying to sneak past us in the line. I refused to let them past. To my complete shock, at the next turn in the line (that went by the exterior wall), I saw their mother join them. She was kind of hard to miss, seeing as how she was wearing a hot-pink blazer that should have stayed in the 80’s. They had settled into the line too far behind us to really care, other than tisk-tisk at each other about how ballsy that is.
And then. About ten minutes later, I noticed that her three children were perched conveniently along the wall that would deposit them neatly in front of us, about a dozen or so people ahead from where we were standing. She placed her hands under the armpits of the first kid. The oldest kid slid sneakily onto the ground, securely in his new place. I grabbed John. I didn’t wait for him to do anything.
In my rustic French, I started screaming. Madame! Madame! Stop, there is a line! Stop, Stop! Or something like that. I don’t really remember. It couldn’t have been much more than that, my French isn’t that good. All I remember was John laughing and saying, “Ok honey, that’s enough.” The woman nonchalantly shrugged. She shook her head at the kid still on the wall and pulled the other ones back over to their original spot, where they’d already cheated an unearned place.
All around me, people were nodding in agreement, saying it wasn’t fair. Later, Avery told me that he heard all kinds of people saying (in French) that they were glad I said something. On one hand, I was surprised that I was the only one to speak up. On the other, I was proud of myself for seizing the moment. I'm not usually very confrontational. It didn’t hurt that we had just come from dinner (which was accompanied by a shared bottle of wine.)
I won’t even get into the sick feeling I have about what kinds of lessons that lady is teaching her kids about cheating. I’m just glad that my own kids got to see me stand up to something wrong and maybe even be a little bit of a hero, however small.
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