Scared and hurt.
Two years ago, around this time, I was sending my children back to school after the very first lockdown we experienced. The pandemic was just a baby, there were so many unknowns and we were grappling with what it meant, for the world and for us as individuals and families. I was working in a small clinic, worried about being exposed and exposing my family to something we knew so little about. I was adjusting my habits and practices to minimise both risk and stress. I was aware of how the way I responded to the unfolding world events, out of my control, would affect my mental health, my physical health and my children. After spending fifteen years working in hospitals and eight years navigating the world of Complementary and Alternative Medicine as a consumer and then a student I had some insights into where the baby pandemic might be headed. I had some strong feelings, right from the very beginning and my biggest fear had little to do with getting sick with a virus.
Fast forward two years, almost to the day and we are back in isolation, this time because we have had the virus. Sunday night, when my daughter came down with a headache and fever, three days after my husband had tested positive- it felt like game day. It felt like we had been anticipating, preparing for, wondering about this moment and what was ahead of us for so long. I was ready, so ready in fact that it felt like a non-event. I layed with her, I watched her breathe, I took her temp with the back of my hand. I held a flannel to her hot little forehead. I chose and adjusted remedies to fit her symptoms as best I could and kept her sipping water regularly from a straw. I gave her what she needed, what she asked for as the evening went on and her fever broke in the early hours of the morning. This is how she has experienced every virus of her life. Laying on my chest, feeling the effects of her body fighting an invader to a peak and then resting to recuperate. My fears were minimal for her but they still came up for me to meet. What if this time is different? What if you’re not doing enough? What if something happens to her and it’s all your fault because you could have done more?
My hurt parts, my scared parts. Trying so hard to protect me from those possibilities. Trying so hard to stay in charge so that I might follow their ‘what if’s’ toward action. Knowing and trusting that her body was equipped for the fight, what I experienced was seeing them, hearing them and staying with them without following them. Then they moved aside and allowed me to feel what she really needed from me. Even though her words on a couple of occasions challenged and bolstered those hurt parts “Mummy I need something, I don’t know what” “Mummy I need help, you’re a nurse do something”, challenges to act, to fix, to do, in her words, her scared parts. Underneath all of that, her need was for me to be. To be steady for her, to hear and hold her hurting parts and scared parts for her, to be with her in her pain and discomfort so that she could rest in it. To stay with the challenge to take your child’s pain away and not do it isn’t easy, it pulls at our deepest, most protective instincts and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t falter. It is also to be with them in their pain though, to move through it with them and to show them how they can do it. When the fever broke and she slept, when the fever broke and her body began to recover from the fight I knew I had made the right call for us.
When I opened my eyes I looked over to see her resting peacefully. I felt relief for a moment before realising that I had been woken by cries coming from down the hall. The same symptoms in her older brother, in my Little Wildflower. A headache and fever- only the gradual build up had happened as he slept I assume. He was close to being overcome with it by the time I got to him. In my still half asleep state, having barely taken a conscious breath since facing my fears for his sister, the hurt and scared parts of me attached to his health and him being ok came screaming up to hit me in the face. We’ve been through so much with him and his health. Years of helplessness, uncertainty and worry that we would never get him well. It’s all still in my body, so much of it still waiting for a turn, for the time to be processed and released. Just like with her, I had what I needed. To clean up the vomit, to measure his heartrate, oxygen levels and temperature. Feeling for what he needed from me however, was so much murkier. His overwhelm, his expression of what he was feeling and the way that parts of me have learned, over the years, to protect me from it, muddied the waters. I wasn’t able to be with him in his discomfort at the level we were both experiencing it or with the parts of me that still hurt and fear for him and what we’ve been through. So my challenge was to stay with that, stay with my inability to handle the situation the way I had with her, the way that something in me wanted to be able to. To stay with the parts of me, that inability was bringing up for me to see.
We numbed the pain so he could settle, we numbed the pain so he could rest. We temporarily numbed the pain knowing that we were only prolonging it, knowing that it would be waiting for us but also that it was necessary. After a few hours as the meds were wearing off we worked together, we gathered tools and talked about the techniques that we know work for him. We stayed with it together, rested in it together and he brought me another challenge. Laying on my lap, he had settled with his eyes closed peacefully. I reached forward as gently as I could for my phone- to see what else I could do for him- to look outside for the answers and he called it straight away. “As soon as you moved to picked that up my headache came back” he said. My apology and instant stillness was not enough to take it back. We were back in the pain, both of us- him feeling it in his head and me in the parts of me that hurt for all the times I got it wrong, all the times I tried to fix and find and do more rather than just being with him and accepting the message in our challenge. After an hour or so he settled again and this time I laid my head beside him, breathed slowly and deeply and closed my eyes. We slept and I saw that he needed exactly the same thing from me that she did. To hold his pain while holding mine. To let the hurt and scared parts of me say their piece and be heard while the hurt and scared parts of him were riling them up. To hear them and stay with them without following them towards an action aligned with fear.
My fear for him has been fed so much in the past. My fear of what happens when his delicate balance tips, when he is overwhelmed and unable to climb out of a ditch. In various contexts and manifestations, memories of him collapsing, melting down, shutting down, glazing over emotionally and physically. Layers of fear in my body and one big question “What if you can’t get him back this time? What if he feels and falls too deep this time and never comes out?”. It’s a question which has led me to follow my fear into actions around not letting him feel or express too much too many times. To shut down and shut him down…to teach him that too much is dangerous, that the way he feels is too much and must be shut down. To pass on what I, and so many of us, learned about feelings and amotions.
By that evening we had both worked so hard, for hours just being with and allowing how he was feeling. We needed rest and he agreed to another dose of pain relief for his building headache. He slept and I layed with him and a few hours later he woke in a sweat and delirium, his fever broke and his eyes just looked relived, so relieved. He went back to sleep quickly and sobbed on and off throughout the night, it felt like directly in my ear so that I had no choice but to hear and stay and listen and just be with him as I slept. From the next morning we slowly built up his strength with small bites and plenty of fluids. He was riding his skateboard through the house by dinnertime and I couldn’t even be mad about it.
It’s a terrible virus. The pandemic has been destructive and damaging in so many ways. Our experience has no bearing on how you or anyone else has or will continue to experience it. Our experience, however, is what it is and from where I’m standing, from what feels like the other side it has brought as much opportunity as it has darkness. It has been one of the most tragic and difficult invitations many of us will ever experience. An invitation to consider our hurt and scared parts, the places in us that have been quietly begging for our attention and the ways in which we have been taught to ignore, dismiss and numb them. It has been an invitation to notice and feel life fully, in extreme beauty and gratitude as well as extreme suffering and loss. Two years ago I was scared, angry, frustrated and uncertain about life, the world, the pandemic and how I would be able to mother my children through it. Today I am so much lighter and more able than ever for the layers that this whole experience has allowed me to lift off and leave behind.
I wouldn’t have looked, I wouldn’t have peered into the deepest darkest corners asking to be shown more, if I hadn’t been dragged to them by the experiences of the past two years. I wouldn’t have had the guts to close the door on what I had always done for work, to acknowledge how it was hurting me and turn in a new direction, if the pandemic hadn’t caused my boundaries to be crossed so severely within that work. I wouldn’t be here. I would be somewhere else and I’m not sure that somewhere else could be anywhere near as beautiful as where I am now.
The layers were so incredibly heavy.
The layers had been in the way for so long.
The layers and the hurt and scared parts of me that protected them were running my life and creating my children’s futures.
But now, thanks in part to this tragic and terrible pandemic, they never will again.
