Pain kicks me – hard – in the back, then pushes me onto the bed. It threatens to hurt me more if I don’t lie still. So I try to do what pain demands, while it invades my body and assaults my mind. I can’t do anything to make it stop. Struggling with pain only makes it worse. I must lie here, I must be patient, I must wait for pain to finish with me, to release its grip, on a schedule of its own choosing. I feel helpless and outraged. I want to get up. I want my day back, my life back. I want to think about my future without wincing. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want this.
People tell me, “Learn from your pain. What message is pain trying to give you?” I want to scream at them. Is the message that my life is too heavy for me to carry? That it’s literally breaking my back? I don’t believe this. The only thing to be learned from my pain is that when bones don’t grow correctly, when a spine curves in all the wrong ways, it’s easy for discs to bulge, for nerves to get pinched, for muscles to freeze up. The only lesson here is that pain hurts. It’s isolating and depressing and exhausting. It teaches me nothing except that I can’t control it. I can only appease it, with ice packs and ibuprofen and the gentlest of stretches.
I want someone to tell me what I have to do to make this pain go away. I want someone to tell me how I can spend the whole day out of bed, how I can fill the dishwasher without kneeling on the floor, how I can carry the laundry baskets by myself. I want people to let me do what I’m able to do and volunteer graciously to do what it hurts me to do. I want sympathy, I want company. I don’t want to feel alone with this pain.
One day I think, “I can’t bear this anymore. I wish I could just disappear.” For a few moments, I forget that I have three young children who would be devastated if I vanished from their lives. I yank my mind away from the thought of disappearing, but not before I remember with a shock that I once heard my mother express a similar wish, all those years ago when I sat in the window seat. And then I finally understand: pain can make you stop caring about everyone else, even your beloved children.
I see now why I stopped going home to visit when I was a young woman. It wasn’t just my mother’s crazy moods, her hostile aggression and weepy withdrawal, or her seeming lack of interest in me. It was also her pain. I couldn’t bear it. It was like having the pain myself. I wanted to make it go away, but I couldn’t. I felt helpless and blamed my mother. I wanted her to make the pain stop, but she couldn’t. I was furious with her for not getting better. So I stayed as far away as I could, sometimes geographically, but mostly emotionally.
If I could go back to those years when my mother spent whole days in bed, suffering pain I can only imagine, I would visit as often as possible and just sit with her. I would make sure she knew she was not alone with her pain. I would stay by her side until she was able to love me again.
The many kinds of raw, aching hurt and need here are beautifully expressed, and so painful to imagine. You write with a surgeon’s precision about the complex layers of suffering, yearning, and loss between your mother and you.
Your empathy and compassion for your younger mother and your younger self, are a kind of salve for these dark, wounded places.
I should say: “Your empathy and compassion for your younger mother and your younger self, seem like a kind of salve for these dark, wounded places.” because that’s how it seems to me. And how I hope it is for you. But I can’t know.
They are truly a salve. Learning to forgive both my younger mother and my younger self has been a powerful experience.