"Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it" ~ Albus Dumbledore
The first time I became conscious of using the word was when I started working as a caregiver for adults with disabilities. I read their files, I saw the medical term "mentally retarded" written in them. For the first time in my life, I put together the medical term with the "slang" and more common use of the word, my clients at the time could have been called many things, but I would not have used any of the words more commonly associated with the R word to describe them...EVER. And so, I became aware of it, and I tried to stop using it. Life went on after that, and though I had mostly removed the word from my vocabulary, my friends and family had not. I didn't say anything, it was just a word I chose not to use.
It wasn't until I was sitting in a classroom in a meeting about my 6 year old child, when the psychologist in attendance said they needed to change his label due to his age, so he would not be classified as DD (developmentally delayed) anymore, he would be MR (Mentally Retarded). That moment in time stands still for me. I remember it like it was yesterday, I remember the words echoing in my head, and feeling so many levels of pain at one time. I remember feeling like I could not breath, like suddenly I was drowning, I remember feeling like someone had just stabbed me in the heart.
"The tongue has no bones but it can break a heart" ~ Ed Sheeran
And why do I HATE that word now? Because my child is not "dumb", "stupid", "crazy", or "ridiculous"........and because, I feel it; I feel it EVERY SINGLE time I hear someone say it, my breath catches and I feel it ALL over again. Every stigma, every hidden meaning, all screaming in my face that my child is whatever they are using the word in place of. I KNOW people don't mean it that way, but that does NOT change what it means to me, or how it makes me feel. I had to start asking people to please not say it, my acquaintances, my friends, my family.....I even went as far once (to a family member) interrupting every time she said it and saying "oh, so you mean it was like my son". I think that night she was furious at me, but she FINALLY understood what I had been trying to tell her, and I am happy to report that since that night several years ago, I've never heard her say the word.
I have also had people try to defend the use of the word to me, I have written those people off for my own sanity. And so through the years people I care about have just respectfully dropped it from their own vocabularies, because they realize how painful it is. One of the proudest moments of my adult life was at one of my birthday celebrations, we were with a group of friends and family at a comedy club, and the comedian was profusely using the R word, I don't think I even sat there for 10 minutes, before my cousin and I got up and walked out, not even 5 minutes later our entire group joined us and we told the manager why we were leaving. Is that huge? Was it life changing? Did the Comedian decide to stop saying the word? No.....but to me, on my birthday.....it was pretty amazing.
"In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends" ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
