Absorb the Pain

I've always been ruled by my feelings. Anyone who knows me well will agree that my feeling sense greatly overpowers my thinking sense, for better or worse. As a child, I always knew who was sad or who needed a friend. And historically, I've followed my gut more than my head.

In other words, I'm sensitive to the pain of others and I respond accordingly. There have been times that I've been overtaken by another person's emotions, teetering dangerously close to making those feelings my own. But as I've gotten older, I've learned how to have compassion for others without becoming a pain-leech.

With my kids, however, this is not so easy. When they are in pain, I seem to absorb it like a dry sponge. The sense is so profound that I can actually feel it in every cell of my body.

Let's take today for instance... this morning, I managed to slam my daughter's tiny hand in the car door. Honestly, I can't believe it's taken me six years of mothering to commit this common offense. The scene looked like this... I was climbing out of the car, into a snow bank, carrying three bags of stuff. My daughter was climbing over her brother in an attempt to get out of the car on his side. Somehow she managed to get her hand into the frame of the driver's side door, and I absently closed it, while reaching for my son's door.

Needless to say, she wailed! It took me a split second to realize what happened, but then I saw her little hand in the door and immediately experienced a flood of guilt and pain. I grabbed her, quickly examined her hand (it was fine, by the way. A little bruised, but otherwise unharmed), and held her against my chest. As she cried, I felt her pain vibrating through my body. It's a difficult sensation to describe, but I feel it whenever one of my kids is hurt (emotionally or physically). It's as though my entire being wants to stop their discomfort, so I in turn, take it on as my own.

I was still feeling the effects of the morning by the time afternoon rolled around. I got my second dose of pain after my son played a harrowing game of checkers with my Dad. My son cannot handle losing, EVER! Growing up, my siblings and I played a lot of games with my Dad and he never just let us win. We were taught the rules and we learned to play fairly. We also learned how to lose; since I was the youngest, I learned this lesson over and over again. Certain allowances were made when we were especially young and still grasping the concept of any given game, but we understood that we had to earn a win. This was an important lesson, because when we did actually have a victory, we felt genuinely proud! There was a deep satisfaction in knowing that we used our minds and skill, rather than having someone hand us a false-victory. My siblings and I are all very different, but to this day, we share this particular trait... None of us expect anything to be given to us on a silver spoon, and we accept our wins and our losses with humility.

Well, my son is still learning this trait, so he didn't accept his loss with any humility. He ran away, crying wildly, throwing insane statements into the air, such as...

"Pop needs to go buy a new grandson!"
"I want my Pop to GO AWAY!"
"Pop HATES me, that's why he wants me to lose!"
"He doesn't love me at all!"

This causes me pain on so many levels! The fact that my son could say such awful things to my Dad is almost too much for me to bare. Knowing what a kind and generous person my father is, it's devastating to hear my child throw such venomous words his way. The pain is further intensified by the thought of my son actually believing such nonsense!

As I hold his sobbing, little body I feel the rush of pain once more. Pain for my son, pain for my Dad, and pain for me that I'm stuck in the middle.

This experience got me thinking... Mothers are often criticized for looking haggard or being too stressed-out, but this experience of pain has a lot to do with it. It's impossible to absorb someone else's physical, emotional or spiritual pain day in and day out, without ever wearing it on your own face. Most of us know that our children are their own unique beings, and we respect their need to have individual experiences apart from us. We know this in our heads, but in our hearts, it feels differently.

Honestly, I don't know if mothers can ever truly create this boundary with their children. Once you commit yourself to loving a child, you can't help but experience every sting of life through them. Since I know that pain is an essential part of growth and understanding, I will continue to guide my children down their authentic paths, knowing that they will inevitably experience bumps along the way. I will do this, because I want them to live and love fully and passionately, but I certainly won't get through unscathed. Too bad they don't make Spiderman band-aids for the spirit; God knows I'll need them!