I’m embarrassed of things I said before Wil was born. I was ignorant. I just didn’t know. Now, when I hear or read certain words, I cringe immediately. My kids cringe immediately. We know better, thank God.
When words hurt, our primitive drive is to react with a fight. Eliminate that word! It is evil. Words are easy targets. They are tangible. Something to go to war on. But is it the word? Or the feeling behind the word? The feeling is in the soul of the word. Once the word is killed, the soul will live on. Like a disease, if the spirit of the feeling goes untreated, it will come back in a different form.
So how do we fight a feeling? How do you fight the spirit of something? Or is even putting up a fight the right thing?
Nobody had to fight me to change my mind. I was instantaneously in a place where I needed to listen. I needed to learn. All that I thought I knew, or better yet, what I thought I didn’t want to know about, was staring me right in the face.
I may have opened my mind over the years with life experiences without having a child with special needs. I already was a fairly open-minded person, but I still closed my mind to things I didn’t want to know about. But now, oh how I want you to see this place. I want so badly for you to understand what I once didn’t. I want you to see how incredibly amazing this place is. How full, vibrant and enriching it is. How you would never, ever think think to throw stones in our direction if you only knew.
I don’t want to fight ignorant feelings. I don’t want to throw the stones thrown at us right back at the thrower. I want to open eyes. I want to open ears. I want to open all senses to the beauty that is right here in plain view.
You can’t eliminate a feeling with a fight. But you can transform a feeling by opening the view to meet all of the senses.
Stories of Wil, my son, who has Down syndrome 