Doesn't it look like the roots are dangling their feet in the water?
My younger daughter is struggling so much right now - she's been living with debilitating pain for years, pain none of the bastards treating her have been able to change or fix or anything else. We've seen neurologists and pain specialists and endocrinologists and psychologists and Chinese herbalists and all of them may as well have been voodoo doctors sticking pins in her for all the relief they provided.
She's had to quit school and hasn't been able to work for years because it was just too much for her system. I've pushed her gently to keep trying, but not too hard because I don't know how much is too much, what is fair to expect of her, what is fair to ask her to endure in the name of what just seems an endless series of hoops she has to jump through in the name of proving what a trooper she's trying to be.
Still. if they can't put a name to her pain beyond 'pain thing' and can offer no hope that it will end (not knowing what triggered the thing they can't diagnose, they can't tell us when or if it will ever stop), she has to find a way to have a life with pain. Millions of people do it - millions of people with terrible afflictions manage to have jobs and families, etc.
The truth is, she's scared. She's afraid of going back to the way it was when the pain was at its worst and she would lay on the couch begging me to do something to help. Just as pointedly, I'm afraid of it. I have never, ever felt so useless and impotent as when I sat, not even able to stroke her hair because my touch hurt, and had to tell her I couldn't take her back to the ER because the narcotics that made the pain go away were messing up her organs. There's nothing worse than watching your child beg you for help that you cannot give. It sometimes feels like watching her die would have been easier, because at least she wouldn't be hurting.
I'm afraid to go back to that. To those days when she hurt so bad and was so terribly sick and getting sicker and no one could tell us why or help me figure out how to tell her no to the things that made the pain go away because they were also going to eventually kill her. To having to say no when she hurts, not be able to help her and sit listening to her cry, raging against the useless cunting doctors and the universe and our genetics and buying books and scouring the internet and lighting candles and trying to learn how to cast spells so I could make her better or trying to visualize sucking her pain from her into me, signing over everything I have to give to the devil or God or the universe if it would just make her feel better. Just a little relief, even just a little, just a night's pain-free sleep.
I learned to live with the self-loathing that comes from failing your child so completely. In fact, I castigate myself happily, willingly, because the punishment is the only relief I get from the guilt. She has to learn what her life is going to be if there is always going to be pain. So when she came to me and suggested she just couldn't take the stress because her head hurt worse than it had in years, I tightened the cilice on my thigh and reminded her that this happens every time she has to start a new semester, or think about getting a job. Suddenly her pain becomes nearly unbearable. I tell her that I know her pain is real, that there is a physical reason for it, but that there is also no denying the psychological component - when she is afraid, she hurts more. She's afraid to try to have a life and get cut down by being sick again, so her body ratchets up the ante in an attempt to avoid the risk.
I tell her that the truth is, this is going to happen every single time she tries to start a new job or school until she forces her way through it and makes her body get used to the idea that she can safely study or work and she won't end up back in the hospital because of it. She has to fight for her life, force her body to get through this or it never will. I tell her that she has already gone through the first five days - if she quits now, she'll just try again later and have to go through those five days all over again. I tell her you've got those first five behind you and if you just force yourself, I swear to God every day you go will get a little bit easier, hurt a little less. I promise her, because every instinct in my body tells me I am right. I tell her that she came to me for absolution - she wants me to tell her that it's ok not to go to work the next day and that I won't do it this time. I tell her she is an adult, now - she has to make this choice for herself, that I will love her no matter what she chooses, but that I believe in my heart quitting again is something she will regret forever.
Then I kiss her and tell her to go back to bed.
And the next morning, she got up and went to work and she hurt less at the end of the day and that night, she hurt less than the night before and she got up and went to work again. I take no credit for her courage or her choice - I told her the truth, that's all. And in the moment, when it felt like I was fighting her for her life, telling her the truth (instead of telling her to quit) was just as hard as telling her she couldn't have the pain pills. What I get to take from it is knowing that, in that single minute - when I found the strength to tell her the truth - I did not fail my daughter.
