Friday, October 23, 2009

Sorry

It is funny that one of the things we really try to teach our kids is to say they are sorry. That is relatively easy compared to the lesson they need to learn, to truly "feel" sorry. Unfortunately for them (us) to truly be sorry for something, they (we) must realize how much their (our) actions or words have hurt another person.

Or in the case of the Triplets, they sometimes need a little dose of their own medicine. William has the gentlest heart but the roughest body. He is much better but he still rough houses with other kids a little rougher than most like and ends up needing to tell someone he is sorry. Just to show his pain threshold let me tell you a story from last week....

I took William to the Doctor as he was the sickest of the three with a cough on the heels of a fever and runny nose. Just to rule out a bacterial infection we had some blood work done. William watched the Nurse as she pricked his finger and then squeezed it for what seemed like a minute to get enough blood. His expression never changed and he never even flinched.

So, needless to say, what he thinks is "fun" often times does not fit others definition:)

William and his best bud and favorite wrestling partner, Caleb.



I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
Maya Angelou

Al

1 comment:

Deanna said...

Amen! I was just saying yesterday that I used to be a constant "apologizer," even saying I'm sorry for things that aren't my fault. I have made an effort to stop saying it, except in cases where I truly mean it! I can only imagine how hard it's going to be to teach children what it means to be sorry!