Katie Crenshaw posts this on her blog – Twelve and Six, a post called “What’s Wrong With Her Face,” Crenshaw wrote she wants everyone to “hold the pity”:
I encourage you to, instead of praying it will disappear, pray that she grows into a confident girl who loves herself no matter what she looks like. Pray that constant comments and opinions from friends, family and strangers will end before she’s old enough to overhear them. Pray that she will be a strong person in the in an age where we are bullied for any number of reasons.
I encourage you to look past it. What if I came up to you and loudly asked “What’s wrong with your baby’s weird ____ ?” Or, “I will pray for your child that her (genetically unusual quality) goes away.”
Just consider that. Consider that you are offering to pray away one of my daughter’s beautiful features that makes her who she is.
Hold the pity. She’s a healthy baby girl and we are blessed. Her hemangioma is just as insignificant to who she is as a freckle on her arm. You don’t need to mention it, and you don’t need to wish it away.
She doesn’t have a “good side” that we choose for family pictures. I don’t retouch her hemangioma in photos. Her entire face is my sweet Charlie, and it doesn’t matter what it looks like.
This is 6-month-old Charlie Crenshaw. Charlie lives with her mom, dad, and older brother in the Atlanta area.
Charlie also happens to have a birthmark called a capillary hemangioma, her mom, Katie Crenshaw, told BuzzFeed News.
The birthmark is a benign vascular tumor, Crenshaw said. The mark is cosmetic, so it doesn’t do Charlie any harm, and she takes medication to ensure it doesn’t get bigger, Crenshaw wrote on her blog Twelve and Six.
“Most hemangiomas involute or disappear eventually,” she wrote.
Crenshaw said she and her husband were bothered because “it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about anymore.”
“We had moved on and just wanted to talk about normal baby things,” she said.
She said the constant comments from family, friends, and strangers began to weigh on her.
Hey guys, got anything else I can chew on?
A photo posted by k a t i e • c r e n s h a w (@katiemcrenshaw) on
Credit: Buzzfeed News
