My Daughter's Pain, My Pain: What's the Difference?

I can remember growing up and learning, slowly, where my parents ended and I began.  It was a difficult lesson and one that took a long time to learn. In fact, I'm still learning it.  Though my mother's and father's voices are in me, though many of their beliefs are mine, though their narratives are deeply rooted in my own, though I maintain many of their values, I am indeed my own person.  Their wounds do not have to be my wounds.  Their desires do not have to be my desires.  Most of us agree that as a child comes into her own, she must find a way to break free from her parents' shadows and cultivate an identity of her own.  To do so, she must become aware of the lines that divide her from her parents.

Is it necessary, though, for a parent---a mother---to clearly define the line that divides her from her children, especially once they become adolescents or adults?  Is it possible? 

Recently someone, a family member, did something that hurt my 18-year old daughter's feelings.  She cried.  I ached for her. And because I know this person well, I called him up and asked about it.  "What you did hurt her," I told him.  "Why did you do it?" 

But he would not discuss it with me.  "Talk to me about your own feelings," he said, "but I won't talk about her feelings with you.  They are hers, not yours." 

I have spent the last several days thinking about this.  It is legitimate to suggest that my daughter, especially now that she is 18, has her own feelings and her own experiences.  But as a mother, how do I know where her pain ends and my own begins?  For mothers, is there always a difference between our children's pain and our own? 

 Last weekend, my six-year old woke in the middle of the night with the stomach flu.  As she vomited and cried into the toilet, I felt nausea and weariness of my own.   My head grew hot, and chills crept down my arms and legs.  But it was not because I was sick.  No, what I felt was something more like empathy; I was sharing her experience, inhabiting her moments with her.  The virus was in her body, but I felt some of the pain.  I felt it until she stood up out of bed more than 24 hours later and asked, with a tiny smile, for something to eat.  

A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter lost her best friend.  It was one of those mysterious adolescent female phenomena;  the friend decided suddenly that she just didn't want to be friends anymore, and she chose cruel words to announce this.  "I despise you," she told my daughter.

The words bit.  Of course, the bulk of the pain was felt by my daughter, but because I could feel her pain, it became mine.  I hurt for her.  The words bit me with every bit of severity as if they were spoken to me.  Which part of that pain belonged to me?  It did not feel separate from hers.  So where did her pain end and mine begin?  

When my six-year-old wakes from a nightmare in tears, I tremble with her, and my heart races as she tells me of the monsters that chased her through the dream.  As she slips back into sleep, our limbs and hair all entangled, I can see the faces of her antagonists--their teethy grins, their wide eyes, their big hairy hands with long nails.  I am not afraid of them, but her fear is embodied in them, and it is what haunts me, keeps me awake as she returns to sleep. 

When I was a child, my own monsters hid in the attic and under my bed.  Now, perhaps because I have discarded those old monsters, there is room for my children's.  

When my nine-month-old cries, my breasts often respond with milk.  My body hears her cry on a core level.  Her hunger is my ache.  It is, therefore, impossible for my body to separate her need from mine.  In fact, as a lactating mother, my very digestive process is reflective of this unity, this collaboration of my self with my child.  Some of the nutrients go to me and some to the milk. It is by nourishing my self that I nourish her.  It is her need for food that my body internalizes.  

With daughters at three different ages, I can attest to the fact that this bleeding over of feeling does not end once a child reaches adulthood.  

While it is my job to help my girls slowly evolve into independent selves, it is not conversely a requirement of me to keep their pain or their joy or their need separate from my own.  In fact, it is because I see their needs as my own that they become free to cultivate identities of their own.  

I reject the notion that I must see my children's hurt as separate from my own.  Hell, I'm no saint, but I often wonder if it is necessary to separate my own feelings from anyone's---if it's possible or healthy or necessary.  I once pulled over on the side of the road to cry for a deer who was slowly dying after she'd been hit.  One of my best friends did something similar for a raccoon one night---pulled over, lay down next to it so that it would not die alone.  She did not leave until the raccoon took its last breath.  

What if we didn't see the pain of a different species as different from our own, the hunger of others as separate from our own?  What if the oppression of others felt like our own?  What would happen if it became difficult for us to see the sadness of a child across the globe as something different from our own sadness? 

J. Krishnamurti, a well-known spiritual speaker, once said "I think there is a way of understanding the whole process of birth and death, becoming and decaying, sorrow and happiness.... we see around us this continual becoming and decaying, this agony and transient pleasure, but we cannot possibly understand this process outside of ourselves. We can comprehend this only in our own consciousness, through our own 'I' process and if we do this, then there is a possibility of perceiving the significance of all existence."

Don't get me wrong.  I separate myself from others and their feelings as much as anyone else.  Sometimes it all becomes too overwhelming.  After students come into my office and share their pain with me--tell me they're homeless, afraid, hungry, dying-- I have felt it necessary to go home and forget for a while, to exist in my own four walls, to live my own singular existence.

I've been insensitive to my husband's feelings.  I've told my kids to suck it up, to give mommy a break.   But those moments when I cannot separate myself from them serve as models of an empathy that I embrace, that gets to the core of something not just deeply maternal but deeply human.   

Finding the Time

"I don't have time," I say too often...to my dogs when they beg for a walk, to my daughter when she wants to play or when she wants pancakes for breakfast, to my husband when he wants to watch a movie, to my friends when they want to get together, to myself when I want to write, to sit for a moment, to just breathe.

Of course I don't have time.  As a mother, a full-time writing instructor, a part-time Zumba instructor, and a writer,every moment is accounted for.  Twice.  In fact, I have come to experience a sort of dread whenever I sit still.  I know if I stop to sit down for too long, enjoy too many long warm sips of my morning coffee, stay too long on the phone with a friend, stay those extra few moments in the shower, something won't get down.  I'll be late to something.  I'll miss something.  I won't get it all done.  And the things on my list are nothing easily brushed off.  There are things like making it to class to teach on time, pumping my breasts for my youngest daughter's milk, getting my five-year old to school on time, paying all of the household bills, completing an online training for work, getting my daughter to dance class, to a doctor appointment, meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, bathing my children, doing their laundry, packing lunches, helping with homework, reading bedtime stories, feeding dogs, cleaning a yard-full of dog droppings, taking dogs for walks, checking mail, calling to argue with insurance companies, and somehow showering.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't think I've ever, no matter how much I've tried, got "it all" done.  Ever.  But I'm constantly inside of it, somewhere wrapped up in getting something done and trying to start on the next item.  And if, at the end of a day, I have not forgotten to show up at work, left my children at school or daycare, AND managed to bathe myself, I consider that a small miracle.

But in the rat race, I too often lose out on the items I love most---my most favorite activities, the things that bring me the most joy.  This is because I save those things for last.  This is how I'm different from my husband who schedules fun and relaxation first.  My priorities are the chores, the bills, the grunt work.  Of course, there is some logic to this as if I don't make lunches or pay bills or clean up dog droppings or make it to class on time, serious consequences may result.  On the other hand, the consequence of ignoring the book I've been reading for four months, my memoir, my friends are potentially as harmful--sadness, anxiety, stress, a loss of motivation.

Lately I have found myself rebelling against the list, and the result is, well, a burgeoning flame of contentment.  For instance, two weeks ago, my older daughter was visiting for the weekend.  I so rarely get to enjoy her that when she comes, I am overcome with excitement.  On Saturday morning, I woke up, ran into the kitchen, and began whipping up pancakes.  When my girls woke up, I served up the pancakes fresh with juice, and I sat at the table sipping my coffee, watching them eat.  Normally, breakfast in my house is rushed, frantic, cold, and bland.  But while I watched my girls enjoy a warm breakfast I had found the time to cook, I felt so relaxed, so satisfied, that I completely forgot about my five-year old's basketball practice that we had already missed.  Whoops.

Still, I felt...at ease.  I felt...good.

The next day, my girls and I sat down with  my husband, and we all played "skat," a family-favorite card game that my five-year old is just now learning.  For nearly three hours, we sat lazily around our dining room table, even my seven-month old enjoying the circle of familiar faces, the laughter, the occasional shriek from one of her sisters, the sound of shuffling cards and coins dropping in a bowl.  When it was all over, I hadn't cleaned the upstairs bathroom.  I hadn't finished my syllabi for the Spring semester.  I hadn't folded the laundry or finished the last two loads.  I had not been to the grocery store, and we were all hungry without any idea what we'd eat for dinner.

Still, I felt alright. In fact, I felt good.

Right now, I'm sitting down to my desk with my coffee.  And although it's cold, I'm devoted to it.  I'll drink it until it's gone even though I should be finishing the grocery list, throwing in another load of laundry, working on my online training, cleaning the upstairs bathroom, and planning for next week's classes.  Still, I'll stay here in front the computer now even though there isn't time for it.  I'll do it because even if the rest of the list were done, my time would not forge itself for me.  Joy would not lay itself out before me.  More chores and requests and responsibilities would find me, and if I looked hard enough, I'd find them.  Instead I choose this right now---cold coffee and my fingers on a keyboard, my Pandora station playing in the background.  I might regret it later.  Hell, I might fail to get a workout in today, or maybe I'll have to rush frantically to make it to the grocery store where I'll surely forget something and have to return in two days anyway.  But somehow this moment, this attention to contentment, will make the frantic trip to the grocery store a little easier.  I'll be better for this time out of the rat race, for the selfish time, the "me time."

Granted, there has to be a balance between responsibility and moments of pure enjoyment.  And I'm sure I haven't found that perfect equilibrium yet.  But the line between list and self begins to blur when our own needs are met.  After a chapter of the memoir I'm reading or game of  family "skat" or an hour with my blog, I can almost enjoy the cleaning of a bathroom or the load of clothes I have to wash and fold.

Almost.




  

"Is She Your First?" A Case against Asking

I can't count how many times I've been asked this question, especially since the birth of my youngest daughter.  She is seven months now, and when I bring her out into the world, people say things like "She's beautiful," "How old is she?" and almost every time, "Is she your first?"

There are many answers to this question.  And sometimes I try answering the simplest way.  "No," I say.  But that has never been enough.  Just last week at the doctor's office, the receptionist continued after my "No."

"How many girls do you have?" she asked.

I thought for a moment.  "That depends on how you count," I told her.

Like most others, she raised one brow and cocked her head at me.  As far as she was concerned, a child was a child.  I should know how many girls I have.

But for me and many others, the answer is not so simple.

At home, I have two daughters.  But I also have an older daughter who lives three hours north.

"With her dad?" people usually ask.

Well, yes.  But it's not what they think.  She lives with her father, yes. Her adoptive father.

"Oh, you gave her up for adoption," people say, praise in their eyes. "What a wonderful, selfless decision.  What a brave thing you did for her."

And I consider telling the rest of the story---the cowardice I associate with my decision,  the ten years I spent apart from my child, the therapy that came with them, the pain, the nightmares, the regret we both still have, the years it took for her to decide to call me "Mom" despite the adoption, the elation I feel flood through me when she does, the fear I still have about how to best be a mother after the distance from one another we've survived, if I have the right.  It's a story that takes time to tell.  It's a long one,  weighted with the nuances of what is deeply personal, impossible to judge accurately from an answer I might convey to you, any stranger, in a grocery line, at a doctor's office, at a Zumba class.

And even if I got through that, I still would not have told you about my 19-year old stepson who lives with us, most of the time.  He's a Freshman in college now, and for the first time in ten years, he has gotten the chance to live with his father.  His two sisters live with their mother, four hours north.  We see them every other weekend.  I love them, my stepchildren.  And they make six.

But that's if I don't count the daughter my husband and his former wife lost shortly after birth, the daughter he still counts as his fourth, the daughter he still grieves.  And so perhaps she, too, is a part of the family, a step-daughter I never met, a piece of my heart, a number--7.

And if I count her, maybe I should count my oldest daughter's twin, the child who made it only four months in my womb before she or he simply "disappeared," as the doctor called it, becoming what the medical community reduces to a "protein deposit."  I didn't even bleed when the baby stopped living, not until 30 days after I gave birth to my daughter when the blood came like a fierce storm, turning my skin white, and sending me into emergency surgery where they would "remove the protein deposit."  Was that a child I lost? Did he or she count?  8?

I do not want to simplify these long stories into one number, one word.

I think about others I know, the old friend who just lost her son at birth, another friend who lost four babies, each to his own miscarriage, a colleague of my husband's who lost a child years ago to cancer, a student who lost two children to foster care as a result of her addiction.  There are parents with a mix of adopted children, foster children, and biological children.  The stories of ourselves as parents are often  highly complex, laced with pain, heartache, regret, confusion, and guilt as well as joy and a series of other mixed emotions.  When we ask someone to count their children for us, we ask them not just to tell us those stories but to reduce them, to tell them quickly, simply, openly to a world ready to judge and sometimes to condemn.

For this reason, when I see a baby, I say something like "What a beautiful baby.  Look at those eyes, those chubby little hands." Sometimes I ask her name, how old she is, if she sleeps through the night.  But the stories of her family, of the others that have come before her, of how her parents count their children, is something more sacred, and with a deep reverence for the thickness of those narratives, I do not ask.

Dear Lawmakers, Enough with the B.M.I.

Dear Lawmakers: 

I am a concerned parent, writing in response to a letter I just received from my daughter's elementary school.  Apparently, my 5-year old daughter's BMI indicates she is "obese."

What I already knew to be true before I received this letter is that my daughter is anything but "obese."  

Curious and rather upset after receiving this letter, I began doing some research.  I was not surprised to find out that BMI is not a reliable indicator of body fat.  The problem is not just that "the indicator does have limitations," as the letter from the schools says, but that it is almost entirely unreliable.  It employs faulty logic to declare an individual obese.  According to NPR's Keith Devlin, BMI, which was created 200 years ago to measure how obese the overall population was, was never intended to measure how obese an individual is.  Moreover, while an obese person may have a higher BMI, a higher BMI is not an indication of obesity.  This is, according to Devlin, not unlike the following logic:  If a get a bike for Christmas, we can be sure my present has wheels.  But just because my gift has wheels does not necessarily mean it is a bicycle (Devlin).  We are mandated by the State to assess our children's individual body fat content with a tool that was never meant to do any such thing and which promises to do so inaccurately.  In fact, according to Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, BMI "actually misses more than half the people with excess body fat" (qtd. in Brody).  Conversely, the indicator often classifies perfectly healthy people as overweight or obese (Brody).  

Why, then, would Pennsylvania demand that our public school system employ this unreliable tool to curb a growing obesity problem?  According to Brody, the answer to this question is simple.  BMI is faster and cheaper than other, more reliable methods.  

To address the problem of unidentified obesity problems, which will likely haunt children for the rest of their lives, we have now employed a strategy than can only serve to mislead parents and children and distract efforts that can be focused in the most effective directions only with accurate tools of measurement.  In other words, to help obese children, you have to actually be able to identify obesity accurately.  And you just can't do that with the BMI.  Worse, hurling out arbitrary declarations of "overweight" or "obese" can actually harm a healthy child's self-esteem and detract from their understanding of health and wellness.  For instance, my daughter exercises daily, eats organic fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats, avoids excess sugars and chemicals in her diet, employs regular deep breathing techniques throughout her day, and even does occasional yoga and Zumba.  This, she understands at the early age of 5, is what constitutes health, not an arbitrary number that measures neither her body fat accurately nor her level of health and wellbeing.  In fact, the BMI ignores all that makes my daughter healthy in favor of a fast and cheap result of an equation, the creator of which warned should not be used for measuring individual fat content.  

I write this email to urge you all against the continued use of faulty measurements in our state's crusade against obesity.  Multiple alternatives exist that will more accurately focus our efforts so that we can effectively combat the growing obesity problem.  For instance, according to Brody, measuring the waist and hips with a tape measure can identify abdominal obesity.  Also a skin-fold caliper can be used to accurately identify how much fat an individual has (Brody).  These are just a couple more trustworthy alternatives. 

Let us not rely on faulty measurements but instead create a firm foundation of reliable data with which we can campaign for better health.  Lifelong health begins with an early understanding of what good health actually is and how it can be manifested.  Rather than distracting from real health risks, potentially harming children's self-esteem, creating the impetus for unhealthy body images and potentially even eating disorders, not to mention wasting our state's valuable time and resources, let us offer our children tools for lifelong health.  Let us arm our children with an awareness of what it means to take care of their bodies lest we leave them floundering with the notion that the shape of their bodies will determine their fates.