Unfortunately, we live in a society that judges with great ease and understands with too much slowness. We opine, we label, with a certainty that sometimes frightens, when an isolated behavior is enough to define an entire life.
Not long ago, in a place as everyday as a doctor's office, someone spoke of their school, and I recognized that that person had shared the same place with my son. According to what they said, “he was strange and a bit naughty,” someone who got into trouble. There was no doubt: from their mouth only labels came out.
She was unaware of the life of that "weirdo", because fortunately his life was very magical. I explained to her that that child had quickly learned to defend himself in a world that was not kind; many things were invented in that school and some were simply the way a wounded child tries to survive. When I clarified her life, full of love, and my son's terrible childhood, she confessed that she had even rejected friend requests and that she was sorry.
Not only was it hard to hear, but to remember. To remember that they even forged his signature; and where a group of mothers decided, because of that “right of admission,” that he should be expelled. They, with a certainty that hurt more than any word.
Remembering the moment when it was proven that he had not been, and even so nothing was ever the same again. I could have done something with those so dignified mothers, but I preferred to keep silent when they called me from the center to apologize to me.
There are things that are not corrected with the truth: they remain, they adhere, they turn into shadows.
Expelled from a birthday party at ten at night, he waited for me lying on the beach sand, crying and swearing that he hadn't done anything, and again they invented that he had taken something. The true damage does not end; it is not erased when they admitted that the backpack thing was a joke and they threw it out, just waiting for him to go pick it up.
I was trying to pick up her pieces, reconstruct her life, and others kept breaking; give her security and that she live without having to be continuously defending herself. There are children who don't need judgments, they need reparation, someone who looks at them without labels; but, of course, that demands something we are not always willing to give: humility.
Humility to recognize that we don't know, to stop pointing out. This text is a cry, although written in silence, a reminder, a request.
Let's not judge what we don't know, what we don't understand. Don't condemn what you have never lived. Not all of us have been so fortunate. We are children, siblings, parents; we don't know what life holds for us. Tomorrow it could be your turn. Then you would understand too late why never, never, step on what is already broken.
I had not told this before, perhaps so as not to stir up what it cost to reconstruct, but due to my job I often see similar situations, quick trials, and silence ceases to be an option.
Perhaps out of pain, perhaps to protect, perhaps not to stir up what it cost to rebuild, but each time I see more quick judgments and I believe that silence must stop being an option.
Although his father is no longer here, I will continue gluing pieces, even if no one sees the effort. He already lacked many things and I will not allow him to also lack someone who doesn't give up: me.
As Harper Lee said, : You never understand a person until you get into their skin and walk around in it.
