To the Pain (or confessions of a wimp)

I’m a wimp.  It’s true.  My kids know it, and that’s okay, because I’m a mom, and don’t have to be big and buff.  The boys John and I taught in Sunday School twenty-five years ago knew it, and it was okay, because I was a ‘girl,’ even if they were totally amazed that I was both a ‘girl’ and a great wide receiver in backyard football.  We used to whup their 11 year old butts, but mostly only after they started talking trash.  My husband knows I’m a wimp (AND a great wide receiver), and it’s okay, although sometimes when we’re carrying heavy furniture or moving a mattress (I’m especially wimpish when it comes to hefting mattresses), I do hear him muttering under his breath something about wishing he had married Dick Butkis.  I let him mutter, because I know that I have less stubble than Dick Butkis after shaving. 

I can’t handle eating hot foods.  My husband loves them, as do most of my kids.  Not me.  I make a delicious enchilada sauce that I serve with my homemade tortillas and all the fixings. My kids affectionately call it wimp sauce because it has no heat to it whatsoever.  They pile on the five-alarm homemade salsa that I make just for them while I dip into the wimp sauce.  We are all content, and my taste buds remain intact. 

I won’t even bore you with tales of childbirth.  Five times.  I did manage the fourth with no pain medication, but baby number five was not kind to me.  I understand that millions of women do this every day without anesthetic assistance; I heard the midwife.  She also apologized to me afterwards for being wrong about things I asked her to do that she assured me I didn’t need her to do.  Again, no details, but to reinforce my point, I don’t like pain of any kind.

I even avoid emotional pain.  That’s not to say I haven’t experienced it.  I just have a way of repeating to myself, “It’ll be fine,” and eventually it kind of is, sometimes with some major emotional acrobatics to adjust my perspective.  I can find a silver lining in a coal mine.  Growing up in a home where depression was the atmosphere du jour, almost every jour, my mechanism was to turn my back on the negative and embrace the positive whenever humanly possible.

Eventually, though, pain must have its day.  Physical, emotional, spiritual, mental; it doesn’t matter.  Pain is gonna getcha one way or another and, all joking aside, I’ve learned something.  Burying the painful thing doesn’t help.  Ignoring the painful thing only works for superficial pain, which isn’t the kind that usually gives us trouble.  Blaming the pain on something or someone else just makes us look childish.  When it can’t be avoided, the only way to get through the pain is just that.  Through it.  All that jazz about Lamaze breathing is just one way to get you to let go and let the pain happen.  Sometimes there’s simply no stopping it, and fighting it only makes it worse.  The fighting makes you tired and it makes you tense, and that just intensifies the agony.  I’ve come to believe that if you can just breathe into the pain, acknowledge that it’s there, respect it, pay it its due, and let it go, we may find that it has less power over us, and is more quickly forgotten.  That’s how I see it, anyway.

Maybe I should take a deep breath and try those hot peppers again.  (written in 2008)