Okay, so I totally over-reacted. I may have lots of bad qualities (which you guys have seen plenty of lately), but I hope being unable to say when I am wrong is not one of them. So, I wrote an email to the injured party, and since I injured in public, I thought it seemed only fair to apologize in public as well. Here's my email:
Dear person of the allergy comments,
I wanted to write to you because now that I have cooled off, I can see that I really overreacted. I should not have gone off on you in such a vitriolic way, even couched humorously, especially so publicly. I am sorry that I lost my temper and vented that anger on you. Here is what I should have said, hopefully written in the mature way I should have said it, instead of behaving like a child. And it should have been private, cause that would be a ton less trailer trash.
"I was upset by your refusal to look at facts and to reevaluate your claims. But, the more important part was how insensitive you were to the mom's feelings. Can you imagine the terror of living every day worried that your child might eat something perfectly normal and then die? Can you imagine the guilt a mom might feel for the time before she was aware of the child's allergy when she ate peanuts? Even though there is no reason to believe that a mom can CAUSE an allergy by eating peanuts, she almost certainly made her child's babyhood more difficult by doing that, though she didn't know. The sorrow for that, coupled with knowing the limitations the child will always face, is immense. So when approaching that mom, one that you know to be passionately devoted to the care of her children and especially that allergy, you should take her feelings into account. You should have made it clear that you were not attacking her personally, and you should have been more willing to listen to the things she was telling you. It makes me incredibly angry to see a person holding onto wrongheaded ideas in the face of facts, but especially to see that person hurting someone I hold very dear with his insensitivity."
That would have expressed my anger without being so mean. That would have been a better thing to do, both for making you understand my point better and for my own character. I would rather be a kinder person who gives people the benefit of the doubt, or at least the respect of criticizing privately and without over-harshness. I wish I had handled it that way from the beginning and found something else to be funny about.
I wanted to tell you why your comments made me so mad, just so you understand better where all that anger came from. Not to excuse what I did at all, since emotionalism can have no excuse. Since being friends with that mom, I have seen people blame her and other allergy moms for their children's illnesses so many times. "You ate peanuts." "Your house is too clean." "You shouldn't have used anti-bacterial soap." I have seen the allergy science that we have completely dismissed. "You have made this all up to get attention." "You are just trying to keep your child close to you with this fake allergy thing." "If he had been exposed to peanuts, he might not be allergic." "If you had kept him away from peanuts, he might not be allergic." This illness is not treated like other illnesses. If a child gets cancer, people say how sorry they are and are interested in new research and treatments. If a child has a life threatening allergy, people are annoyed and believe it's fake and use old wives' tales to talk about the way it should be handled. I have seen people who actually know peanut allergic children be unwilling to forgo bringing unsafe food to the child's house; I have seen moms who are pissed because they can't send peanut butter to their child's school. It kills me how little support these families get and how ready uninformed people are to tell them why it happened and what they should do about it.
None of those things were your fault. In once conversation you said things that I considered ignorant and insensitive. All the other stuff was not your fault at all, and I should not have let my huge amount of anger toward the whole situation be vented on you. I don't expect you to actually answer any of the things I said above. I'm sure you are ready to be done with this and to not hear from me again. But I wanted you to know that I regret losing my temper and I regret not telling you what I thought in a more mature and respectful way. I want you to know that I sincerely apologize, and I will use what I learned from this debacle to keep my temper in better check in the future. I'm making this public on my blog as well, since it seems only fair that since I freaked out on you in public, I should apologize in public too.
I'm sorry.
Kelly
