In Living Color

Since I was a little kid, I've been fascinated by genetics.  I've always known that both my brother and my uncle are color blind, and I remember my mom explaining to me, at a very young age, exactly how that had happened - how the color blindness gene travels on the X chromosome, why men with their single X chromosome are therefore far more likely to be color blind than are women who would need to have two "tainted" X chromosomes to exhibit color blindness.  All this was so interesting to me, and I remember learning about other similar sex-linked traits in high school biology and then in a semester-long genetics course at Colby.  While the genetics behind the transmission of color blindness is fascinating, the reality of the trait was never much of a big deal for my family.  Color blindness was a party trick - people loved asking Paul "what color is this?", "what color is this?", "now what about this?", and he was a good sport until it got really old and he wasn't.  But it was never an issue for Paul - he has adapted and learned which colors he can recognize and which he can't and lives a perfectly normal life despite his inability to see the range of colors that most people do.  When Paul was in preschool, however, one of his teachers expressed some concern over his learning capabilities because he couldn't seem to grasp his colors.  And later, when Cuisenaire rods were en vogue among math teachers, he was at a disadvantage because he couldn't immediately recognize the orange ten or automatically distinguish the yellow five from the green six.  So while color blindness really shouldn't matter, it can, particularly in early childhood education, where so much of the learning is focused on and around color.  And so I find myself mulling over all this the other night as I fill out Adam's kindergarten (gasp!) paperwork.  A question reads: "Does your child have any known or suspected vision problems?" and I hastily check "No", as I have to all the questions before it.  But then I pause, and think, and erase my answer, instead checking the "Yes" box and writing "color blindness suspected" beneath it. 

We have assumed that Adam is color blind for a long time.  According to the rules of genetics, I had a 50% chance of carrying the color blindness gene, and if I had that gene, each of my children would have a 50% chance of being color blind.  I forget exactly how additive probabilities work, but I'm pretty sure that means that there was a 50% chance that at least one of my children would be color blind.  Unlike letters, numbers, words, and shapes, colors came slow to Adam.  Some of the first words Adam read were those on his markers and crayons - his inability to distinguish a brown crayon from a green crayon motivated him to read their names to give him a clue.  I notice him making the common mistakes that Paul makes - green for brown, light blue for pink, gray for violet.  But Adam seems unfazed by his inability to see colors in the way that most of us do.  He adapts, learns new tricks to identify colors, and asks for help when he needs it.  The other day, he was working on a Perler bead design and was having a lot of trouble finding bright yellow beads in his mishmash box of colors.  So he asked me to pull out one bright yellow bead, and he carefully placed it to the side.  Then I watched him, with painstaking effort, take out bead after bead and place each one next to the bright yellow bead for comparison.  I watched him bend down close to the beads, with his little nose almost touching them, trying to determine whether he'd found the right color.  It was endearing, and I was so proud of his effort. 

Adam's efforts don't get him all the way there, and he still mistakes his colors more often than not.  When he asks for help he says, "Mommy, can you help?   'Cause I don't see colors so well."  What I should tell him is that he see colors just fine.  Colors are subjective, and who knows whether the purple I see looks like the purple you see, or whether it really is purple at all. 

I know that this little Easter egg was "supposed" to be pastel green, but who's to say it shouldn't be tan instead?  All I do know is that we have one little determined almost-kindergartner who won't let a little color blindness stand in his way.