Armed for Battle

Perhaps my efforts toward embracing social isolationism have not been as successful as originally thought. Yesterday I’d been confident that I’d be able to take a short nap without the interruption of holiday calls and texts. No sooner had I posted my entry than my phone beeped, alerting me to the first of twelve messages over the course of the following few hours.

It reminded me of when, years ago, my (now) wife and I sat down to draft an invitation list to the wedding reception we’d been planning at the time (and have yet to celebrate, by the way). I’d been appalled at the number of people; I would never have guessed that I knew that many. And those were just the ones with whom we wanted to share a special occasion, not even everyone whose feelings may have been hurt by not receiving an invitation because there were a few tussles over certain people not being on the list—in the interest of the greater good was my argument, which won out over personal interests and the desire to not cause personal slights.

Because my daughter is with her father and his wife for the holidays, the mom in me can’t sleep with the phone turned off. As ridiculous as it sounds, it’s true. Rationally, I know that if anything should happen there are no fewer than six people my ex could call. In fact, now that I think about it, he may not even call me directly should an emergency arise—he may call my wife to make sure I wasn’t alone when I got the news. They’re both like that, my ex and my wife. So fortunate we all are to get along. But these things do not warrant further examination.

The end result of my napping phone neurosis was that my wife and I spent Christmas with her family, both of us with very little sleep and one of us in great pain and a foul mood (guess who). If my Herx cycle stays on course, I should feel better today. Little good that did me yesterday, though.

Both mature mother figures of the family (as opposed to my wife, myself, and my sister-in-law who are all moms in our thirties) are currently experiencing great physical pain. One of the women has lived with pain all her life; the other has not had this constant companion. All of us daughters noticed the difference in how the moms coped with the pain, how it bled through in their behaviors differently.

One wore it plainly in her facial expression and body language. Her syntax and diction even changed, along with the topics of conversation straying from their normal positive subjects. I’ll have to pay attention to the language shifts, though. That could be interesting.

Again, I digress. A person would have to be on a familiar basis with the mom who’s known daily pain to detect how much pain she was in. Partly because she’s learned to push through it and probably somehow compartmentalize it in her head. She distracts herself with multiple simultaneous conversations as a primary coping mechanism, I suspect, and this brings me to the other part of why it is difficult to detect her pain. She herself isn’t aware of it.

Last week she seriously injured herself and a dozen x-rays (insisted upon by her husband, otherwise she never would have gone to the doctor at all) revealed the full extent of the damage. She needs surgery and has been instructed to limit her physical activity.

We discussed this briefly last night, she and I, that to the two of us it isn’t all that remarkable that she would have hurt herself to the point where surgery was required to repair the damage and her own assessment had been that it was just a bad sprain. At that point in the conversation I looked over at the other mom in pain, and she had her head back and her feet up in her recliner, eyes closed for a moment. But her face was not restful; even then her eyes retained that squinty expression.

Meanwhile, in that split second, the mom I’d been talking to had struck up two more conversations, so I went into the kitchen to fetch myself some coffee and Bailey’s. Again, I know my doctors would not approve. My sister-in-law even raised a brow at me but only grinned when I said it was worth the seizure risk. I think her eyes may have strayed to the living room to assess additional risks, but she would deny this if asked (as she should).

They must have been on my mind in my sleep, the moms in pain and how differently they’re coping, because this morning on the porch my thoughts turned to my daughter. She’s now a teenager, and she’s blessedly known little physical pain or suffering. But the blessing has a flip; how will she cope if she’s injured?

She was twelve before she fell off a scooter and scraped her palms for the first time. Only the shame of crying in front of her best-friend kept her tears at bay, she later told me. I hadn’t been there, but later I heard all about it and how unfair she thought is was that she was wearing a helmet, elbow pads, aaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnd knee pads, but it was her hands that got hurt.

Mind you, she’d armed herself for battle better than I had when I rode my bike down mountain roads at her age, with nothing between my body and the gravel but air. I’d been fearless at her age; still am, relatively so, about some things. But she’s always been a cautious child.

My wife frequently complains that we are raising a mini-me, that she has to live with two versions of her wife: one grown and the other still a teenager, that we thus have an unfair advantage (three women living in one home with no offsetting testosterone is all I have to say on the subject for now). In thinking, this morning, about the ladies last night, my own crabby mood and pain, my cautious child and the own risks I’d taken at her age, I realized that we aren’t raising a mini-me at all. We’re raising my grandmother.

She’d passed on by the time I met my wife, so she probably can’t see the similarities, but they’re there. Our child is a clear blend of her kind father and my cautious grandmother. When my daughter was born, my first impression was of how very old she seemed. And prepared. Not traumatized by the birth at all.

I remember, as a child, my mother complaining that my grandmother had been born old. And since my mom appears to have been born with a feather up her rear, so ready is she for flight at any moment, my grandmother’s reserved nature rankled her last nerve. I would bet it still does, even though this month marks thirteen years my grandmother’s been gone.