The way I see it....

Choose wisely

I feel overwhelmed with the need to share something with you all.  This is something that has happened to me not once, but twice.  Once?  I can shake it off, even though it’s hard.  Two times? Not so much.

Here’s what happened:  I was sitting somewhere and someone made a comment about being able to pay for something and finished that statement with, “Even if somebody has to sell a kidney.”

Now, you all have been here in this little corner of the paper long enough that you know what we’ve been through with Blake.  Actually, every person that was in this room when this comment was made also knew what we had been through.  You can imagine how well that went over with me. I just sat there and absorbed it.  I didn’t say anything, but I am telling you that my heart was palpitating out of my chest.

I know people say things as expressions that they don’t mean.  I’m not going to tell you I’ve never done it because I have and I have felt awful about it.  I realize that people joke about selling a kidney, I get it.  But is that really the appropriate thing to say?  Is it even less appropriate when you have somebody sitting there whose small child was born with kidney disease and it was so incredibly hard for them to find a donor?  No.  Not even a little bit appropriate.

I vented about this on social media and the response I got was eye-opening.  Things people say about fertility, alcoholism, suicide and the list goes on.

I am in no way saying that these words were said in an intentional way to purposely be rude or to upset me.  I do not feel like this was the case at all.  Was it an awfully poor choice of words?  Absolutely!

I think that we as adults sometimes worry so much about things that kids say to each other that we forget that we, as adults, can hurt each other a lot (whether intentional or not) with our words. We, the adults, need to set an example for kids.

I  think if we all took a couple of extra seconds to really think about what we’re going to say before we say it we would be a lot better off.  Remember that scars heal.  Cuts heal.  Broken bones heal.  Words?  Words are something that you can’t take back and it sometimes takes a lot longer to heal from the damage words can do.  So, just be kind and choose your words wisely, but that’s just the way I see it.