What I Meant to Say Was . . .

I know you’ve done it.

I know I have.

Blurted out something that sounded a whole lot different in your head.

It’s true.

Your brain coughs up a thought.

And hits ‘send’.

Then, somehow, during transition, it gets . . . mixed up.

Maybe exposure to the air changes it.

And it ends up sounding like . . . nothing you intended.

My mom was a master at this.

Example one:

Picture Christmas Eve.

Every available surface in the kitchen groaning beneath seven layers of freshly-baked Christmas delicious-ness.

No supper in sight.

A starving son-in-law, passing the piles of goodies.

Hunger overcomes discretion.

He pops a butter tart into his mouth.

Mom, emerging from the point of action in front of the oven, red-faced and carrying yet another pan of treats, “Don’t eat that! It’s for Christmas!”

Example two:

Mom brings home the good peanut better.

Not the cheap stuff which comes in a tin, allowing all of the oil to rise to the top so that the upper layers are too creamy and the bottom layers need to be chiseled from the container with a hammer.

Then passed through the meat grinder to make them of a consistency to spread.

Which tin, I should mention, is still on the shelf.

Gathering dust.

Sooo . . . good peanut butter.

Which is immediately set upon by the ‘finickily-starved’ (I just made that up) peanut butter fiends that inhabit the house.

 “I’m going to stop buying that peanut butter. You kids just eat it!”

Mom taught her daughters well.

I, too have had my share of ‘things-said-that-didn’t-come-out-just-right’.

We were discussing a young man of our acquaintance who had been born with weak joints in his hips.

My mother-in-law was cautioning my kids not to jump off the retaining wall in her back garden, citing this young man as an example of ‘damage that could follow’.

I knew that his condition was genetic.

Or congenital.

Which mean the same thing.

What came out was, “Oh, but I thought his condition was genital!”

Something vastly different.

Wait. Everybody un-hear that!

Just let me suck those words back into my mouth!

Admit it.

It’s happened to you . . .