While the rest of the country is covered in snow, my friend Jennie and I decided to take her three children and my two to the beach in Ventura, California for the day. It was beautiful. Sunny. Clear blue skies. In the eighties. The children had fun digging and dragging buckets of ocean water over the sand over and over again until they were exhausted.

When it was time to go home, Jennie packed a bunch of stuff into her car first in preparation for the possible need to drive her seven-year-old Conner back from the beach. Conner is severely developmentally delayed due to a birth defect. Also, one day last year at school, his heart suddenly stopped. For half an hour, emergency workers tried to get his heart started, and when our local hospital couldn’t stabilize him, they airlifted him to UCLA Medical Center, where he spent several months. Oxygen deprivation increased the delays he already had.

When I finally got a chance to sit down with Jennie, she explained that what she hated most was pity: people pitying her like she had to carry a cross. “I stood next to my son for half an hour, believing he was dead,” she told me quietly. “Every day we have with him is a gift. We wouldn’t make him into a typical kid if we could. To us, he’s perfect just the way he is. He’s Conner.”

Returning to our cars, we scramble for sand, loaded down with beach toys, chairs, umbrellas, and bags. Jennie was ahead of me, and when I got to the stairs that went down to the street, she had left the two chairs she was carrying at the top of the landing. Interestingly, there was a group of about ten older women gathered at the top of the stairs. Conner was standing in the middle of the street, his pants lost on the beach, his knees drawn together and sobbing as Jennie tried to get one of the women to move chairs from the landing to the street. “Jen,” I told her, “I have the chairs. Don’t worry about them.” “Are you sure?” she asked, always graceful under pressure. “Positive,” I replied. Jennie turned around and lovingly scooped Conner up into her arms and proudly headed out into the middle of the cul-de-sac. Conner’s lanky seven-year-old body wrapped around her small five-foot-one frame, his bony knees and elbows sticking out to the sides, safe in her mother’s arms.

I could hear the women clucking and cooing. “Poor baby… He’s exhausted.” He wanted to believe that his empathy was strictly for a tired child, not a handicapped child and his brave mother, but I suspected the latter. I thought to myself that a younger person in this situation might explain, “Well, he was born with ___.” I just wanted to take them all out with my beach bag.

That’s when I realized I couldn’t explain Conner’s condition even if I wanted to because I couldn’t remember what it was anymore. He was stunned. Jennie and I had talked about it many times when we met, but less and less over time. Jennie is one of my best friends in the world. I certainly didn’t forget because I don’t care. I realized at that moment that I couldn’t remember why I don’t think of Conner as “Conner who was born with ___.” I just think of him as Conner. I greet him as I greet his other children. I treat him the same way I treat his other children. I think of him the same way I think of his other children. He is a beautiful and perfectly complete child just the way he is. For a moment, I felt what she explained in the cafeteria that day. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

What saddens me the most is that when I am with my children, I receive inner smiles and recognition from other adults, indicating that they know how lucky I am to have such beautiful children. When my children do something nice or say something extraordinary and someone listens to them, they look at me like this. Jennie deserves to get that look on beautiful Conner of hers because that’s how she feels about him, but I wonder if she mainly gets looks of pity or condolence.

This makes me want to tear the world apart and unite it into a better place. Conner and Jennie deserve a smarter, better place.