Bowling Is Meant To Be Fun

On the weekend, Katy and I took our nephew out bowling. We were about halfway through the game when a boy (maybe 14yo) came up to our lane and picked up the bowling ball I had been using off our rack. At first I thought he was being silly, but when he turned to walk away with my bowling ball, I stopped him and said that I was still using it.

As he put it back down, I heard his mother (or who I assume was his mother) whisper angrily at him “Over there” and point at the wall behind us where all the spare bowling balls were.

I was a bit put off by the mother’s reaction, so I watched him as he picked his ball and went back to his lane and immediately start bowling. By himself. And I don’t just mean that he was the only one bowling (which is true as well), but it was as if his mother wasn’t even in the same room. The whole time she sat virtually unmoving except for her fingers on her mobile phone, either playing some inane game (that didn’t seem to bring any pleasure to her judging from her facial expression) or sending messages to people more important than her son standing in front of her.

He finished two whole games in the space it took us to finish the second half of ours and each time he turned towards his mother after sending the ball down the lane, he was stonewalled by her. So he would just turn around and keep bowling. Even when he got a strike and let out a small yelp of excitement, his mother didn’t even look up.

The whole scene broke my heart and even writing about it now makes me upset.

The thing is, the boy obviously had some sort of intellectual impairment and I realise that raising a child with a delay can be incredibly hard. And stressful. But there was literally no warmth, compassion or even a negative sentiment from the mother, only indifference and a feeling of inconvenience.

Katy’s nephew suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome and often has some really challenging behaviours to deal with, but its fairly clear to him and everyone else that he is loved very much by his family.

So why couldn’t this kid have that same knowledge that his own mother loved him?

It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. And I work for a child protection agency and hear of much, much worse things happening to innocent children, yet this was still much sadder.

I hope that at some point someone enters into his life and shows him how important he is and how much he is loved.