Am I the a**hole for standing up in the middle of a church service and saying exactly what I said?
I (62F) have been raising my grandson Devin (9M) since he was four years old, after his parents couldn’t. Devin has cerebral palsy – he uses a forearm crutch and his speech is slower than other kids his age, but he is SHARP, he is funny, and he has been going to that church with me every single Sunday for five years. We have a mortgage on the house we share, a routine that keeps him stable, and a community I thought we could count on.
The youth group at our church is run by a woman named Brenda (52F). I’ve known Brenda for years. She always smiled at Devin on Sundays, always said his name, always acted like he belonged there.
Last month she started a new Wednesday night program for kids 8 to 12. I signed Devin up the same day I heard about it. He was so excited he made me drive past the church on the way home just to look at the building.
The first two Wednesdays went fine. The third Wednesday, I dropped him off and came back an hour later and he was sitting alone in the hallway outside the room. Not inside. Outside. His crutch was leaning against the wall and he was just sitting there on the floor.
I asked him what happened. He said Brenda told him the activity was “too physical” for him and he should wait in the hall until it was over.
Too physical.
They were making a poster.
I went back in that Sunday. I sat in my usual pew. I waited until the part of the service where Pastor Greg opens the floor for announcements and community concerns, which he does every single week.
I stood up.
Brenda was sitting four rows ahead of me. She turned around when she heard my voice.
I said, “I have a concern about the youth program, and I’d like everyone here to know what happened to my grandson – “
That’s when Brenda stood up too, and she looked at me and said, “Donna, this is NOT the place – “
I looked her dead in the eye, in front of every single person in that room, and said –
What I Actually Said
“This is exactly the place.”
And then I kept going.
I said that my grandson Devin had been sitting in the hallway of this church for an hour on Wednesday night because a grown woman decided he was too broken to make a poster with the other kids. I said that Devin had been coming to this church since he was four years old, that he knew every face in that room, that he had colored Christmas cards for the seniors’ ministry and brought canned food for the Thanksgiving drive and recited a Bible verse in front of this entire congregation last Easter without a single stumble.
I said he had been excluded from a craft project.
A poster.
I let that word sit there.
Brenda started talking over me. Something about liability. Something about her responsibility to all the children. Her voice was doing that thing voices do when a person knows they’re wrong but has decided speed is a better strategy than honesty.
Pastor Greg was on his feet by then, hand out, doing the pastoral traffic-cop gesture. I’ve seen him use it during disagreements about the parking lot. I had not expected to be on the receiving end of it.
I didn’t sit down.
The Part Nobody Talks About When They Tell This Story
Here’s what I want people to understand about that morning, because some folks in my life have since told me I embarrassed Brenda, and I want to be clear about something.
I had already tried the quiet way.
The Thursday after the hallway incident, I called Brenda’s cell phone. She let it ring to voicemail. I left a message that was, if I’m being honest, too polite. I said I’d love to chat when she had a moment. That I just wanted to understand what had happened. That I was sure there was some kind of miscommunication.
She texted back four words: Let me look into it.
That was eleven days before that Sunday.
No follow-up call. No email. Nothing at Wednesday’s program, because I kept Devin home that week. I wasn’t ready to drop him off somewhere he’d been put in a hallway and just hope for the best.
Eleven days of silence from a woman who had smiled at my grandson’s face every Sunday for five years.
I also want to say this: Devin didn’t cry when I found him in that hall. That’s the part that got me, that still gets me when I think about it. He wasn’t crying. He was just sitting there with his back against the wall and his crutch propped up next to him, and when he saw me he said, “I knew you’d be early.” Like he’d been timing it. Like he’d been waiting to be retrieved.
Nine years old. Already practiced at waiting to be retrieved.
The Room After
When I finished talking, the church was quiet in a way I had never heard it be quiet before.
Brenda sat down. I don’t know exactly when that happened. At some point her voice stopped and she was just sitting.
Pastor Greg said something about bringing this to the appropriate committee and addressing it with the care it deserved. I recognized the phrasing. It’s the phrasing churches use when they want to move a problem into a room with a door they can close.
I said, “I’d appreciate that, Greg,” and I sat down.
The woman next to me, Paulette, who I’ve shared a pew with for going on eight years, put her hand over mine without saying anything. She left it there for a while.
After the service, three different people came up to me in the parking lot. One of them had a daughter with a hearing impairment who’d had her own version of the hallway situation two years back. She’d never said anything to anyone. She just pulled her daughter from the program and told herself it wasn’t worth the fight.
Another woman told me she was glad I said something. Then she looked over her shoulder before she said it.
That look over the shoulder bothered me more than anything Brenda had said.
What Devin Knows
I haven’t told Devin everything about that Sunday.
He knows I talked to some people at church about what happened. He knows because he asked me on the drive home why I looked like I did, and I told him I had a conversation that I felt good about. He thought about that for a second and then asked if we could stop for a grilled cheese, which we did.
He doesn’t know that two women cried talking to me in that parking lot. He doesn’t know that Pastor Greg called me on Monday and used the words “we take this very seriously” four times in eleven minutes, which is roughly once every two and a half minutes, which tells you something about how seriously they were taking it.
He doesn’t know that Brenda sent me a text that evening that said: I never meant to make Devin feel excluded. The activity involved some movement and I was trying to protect him.
Trying to protect him.
From a poster.
I read that text three times and then I put my phone face-down on the kitchen table and went and checked on Devin, who was at his desk doing a word search. He does word searches the way some people do crosswords, fast and with total focus, circling letters like they owe him something.
I stood in the doorway for a minute. He didn’t look up.
What Happens Next
Pastor Greg’s committee met. I know this because I was invited to speak to them, which I did, for about twenty minutes, sitting at a folding table in a room off the fellowship hall with four people who kept nodding in a way that felt more like a reflex than a response.
I brought documentation. I’d written down the dates. The voicemail. The text. The eleven days. The exact words Devin had used when he told me what Brenda said. I had it all on two pages in a plastic sleeve, which I think surprised them. I think they expected me to be emotional in a way that would be easier to manage.
I was emotional. I just also had documentation.
They’ve since revised the youth program’s inclusion policy, in writing, with specific language about disability accommodation. Brenda is still running the program. I know some people think that’s the part where I should be angrier than I am, but I’ll be honest: what I wanted was the policy change. What I wanted was for the next kid with a crutch or a stutter or a wheelchair to walk in that door and have something in writing that said they belonged there.
Devin went back to Wednesday nights two weeks ago. I dropped him off and I sat in my car in the parking lot for the full hour because I am sixty-two years old and I have earned the right to sit in a parking lot if I want to.
When he came out, he was walking with a kid named Marcus, who is ten, and they were arguing about something with the intensity that only boys under twelve can sustain about something completely inconsequential. Devin was laughing.
He got in the car and said the snacks were better this week.
That was it. That was the whole debrief.
I drove home. I did not cry until I got to the stop sign at the end of Birchfield Road, which is about four blocks from the church, and then I cried for most of the drive home, ugly and relieved, the way you cry when something you were holding for a long time finally gets put down.
Am I the a**hole?
No.
And I’d stand up again.
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If this one hit close to home, share it. Someone else out there is still sitting in that parking lot, trying to decide if it’s worth the fight.
For more stories about standing up for what’s right, check out My Seven-Year-Old Noticed Something About the Neighbor Girl. I Couldn’t Pretend I Didn’t., or if you’re in the mood for some drama, read about how My Wife Slipped Her Phone Into My Jacket Pocket at Her Work Party and how My Husband’s Work Bag Had a Key in It. I Drove to the Address..
