2-Year-Old With Facial Birthmark Has the Most Mature Response to Bullies

Children can be brutally honest, which means sometimes children can be mean (even if they don’t intend to be). Lydia, a little girl who was born with a port-wine stain — a prominent, reddish birthmark — on her cheek, learned this firsthand shortly after her mother, Kelly Wilson Bossley, dropped her off at preschool on Tuesday. “I could tell my daughter noticed some of her new classmates staring and whispering when they saw the fresh bruising on her face from her latest treatment to keep her port wine stain birthmark healthy,” Kelly wrote in a post on the Love What Matters Facebook page.

The post was accompanied by an image of the kid sweetly grinning and clutching her teddy bear. But don’t let Lydia’s smile fool you. Little Lydia is tough as nails. According to her mom, instead of running off to cry or succumbing to the hurtful words, the little girl made a beeline to her cubby, where she grabbed a copy of the book Sam’s Birthmark, which tells the story of a real boy — the son of authors Martha and Grant Griffin — who was also born with a port-wine stain on his face. Lydia handed the book to her teacher and requested it be read to the class.

Even for an older child, such a constructive, mature response to bullying would be impressive. But coming from a child this young, it’s utterly astonishing. And Lydia’s mother recognizes this, writing in her post: “She isn’t even 3 yet but her resilience and ability to self-care blows me away. I cried nearly the entire way to work — not because I worry how her peers will treat her in the years to come but because I know this girl is gonna do big things!”

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According to the U.S. Library of Medicine’s Medicine Plus website, a port-wine stain is “a birthmark in which swollen blood vessels create a reddish-purplish discoloration of the skin,” hence their nickname. WebMD states that these birthmarks are a result of a gene abnormality that occurs in the womb after conception, which is why most people afflicted are born with the mark — about one in 300 babies, the site says (though another WebMD article reports that number to be three in every 1,000 babies). “These birthmarks … are not caused by anything the mother does or doesn’t do before or during her pregnancy. You can’t prevent them,” the site clarifies.

Though WebMD confirms that port-wine stains grow as the child grows, they can — and often are — treated. The treatment Lydia’s mom was referring to may have included laser therapy, which WebMD cites as a popular option. Kidshealth.org confirms: “Laser therapies can make many port-wine stains much less noticeable and give kids’ self-esteem a much-needed boost.”

But Lydia seems to be doing better than one might expect in the self-esteem department. According to the Huffington Post, she has endured verbal jabs such as “She would be so pretty, if it wasn’t for her face,” her mom, Kelly, says. Another neighbor refused to play with “Purple Face,” according to the article. Realizing that this would be a battle Lydia would have to face even when her mom wasn’t around to protect her, Kelly made an early effort to educate her daughter about the birthmark that makes her different from most other kids, rather than teach her to be combative and defensive.

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“I made a conscious effort to tap down my mama bear and instead be a model for my daughter so that when I wasn’t around to protect her, she could deal with it in a positive manner,” Kelly told the Huffington Post. She added that she tries to help Lydia understand that “people are just curious about her birthmark,” hoping it will help her daughter let the comments roll off her back.

The authors of Sam’s Birthmark were honored to hear that their book played a key part in Lydia’s precocious, proactive response to her insensitive peers. Martha, one of the authors, even commented on Kelly’s Facebook post: “I am the author of Sam’s Birthmark. When I see posts like Lydia, I tear up!! Our son was born with a port wine stain covering half of his face. We soon realized there was not a positive-message children’s book where the child character had a birthmark, so we wrote one. Connecting with birthmark parents from around the world has been truly amazing!!!”

“Overall, I want her to know that people are inherently good, and she is in a unique position to educate others if she chooses to,” said Kelly, confirming that she is doing this “mom” thing just right.

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