Stranger Than Fiction

I was reading a fiction book the other day for my book club and ran across a passage where one of the main characters was retelling a story from her childhood. She had seen a boy with a developmental disability do something inappropriate and she went home and told her dad. She told her dad because she knew it would get his attention and she wanted his attention. What she failed to tell her dad was that the boy who had done the inappropriate thing had a cognitive disability. The father got very angry and went to the boys house to chew out his parents.

It was strange reading that passage because it brought back a memory of something very similar which happened to us a couple of years ago. Kellen arrived home on the school bus and about fifteen minutes later there was a knock on our door. Sweet Husband answered the door only to find a very angry African American woman standing there. She started to go on and on about how our son had "spit" on her daughter at school and yada, yada, yada. Dear Husband let her go on for awhile and then called Kellen to the door so that she could see that he had Down syndrome. He also explained that Kellen didn't know how to spit quite yet and asked if he may have been blowing raspberries. The mom was somewhat embarrassed and apologized and went back home.

I was really upset when I got home and heard about this. I felt very violated in my own home. How did she know where we lived? Why would she come and knock on our door instead of just asking her child's teacher what had happened at school? What was the big deal about blowing raspberries? Why did she jump to such a huge conclusion instead of finding out more information from her daughter? What would have happened if our son's disability had been an "invisible" one?