Thanks for the $5

Stephanie

January 30

Bloganuary writing prompt

What do you complain about the most?

Every year on my birthday, at least until my mother and she stopped speaking again, I would receive a card from a grandmother I had never met. Inside was $5 and a letter, half of which was a laundry list of her health ailments and doctor's appointments. This was confusing because there was nothing I could do with the information. The letter seemed to suggest the ailments as a reason for bonding and care, but at a distance and with no other connections or ways to help, it just painted a picture in my mind of a person too busy or burdened to be close to.

Thanks for the $5.

I think that's when I began keeping the mental checklist of things I wouldn't talk about, especially concerning health. "What happens to old people that they lose all boundaries?"

I grew vigilant around not falling into this type of complaining, and later, quite insensitive. When my mother complained of weather migraines and went to bed, I didn't believe her. If she watched TV all day on a day off while having me do the chores, I was highly judgmental, especially since when my great-grandmother gave chores she worked beside me.

Of course, I didn't yet have aches and pains of the sort the adults around me contended with. I hardly remember getting tired at all until I was in my twenties and holding down real jobs. Yes, there was unnecessary sickness too, from their drinking and partying, or getting way too stressed over minor things, and I was perceptive about that, but sadly I think I also just grew cold.

It wasn't that there was a specific need I had for them to be there to fill, but that various aches and illness as ready go-to for why they weren't available generally, dulled my concern. I didn't have the language, but came to believe giving much attention to health concerns was a slippery slope to avoid at all costs!

You know what I'm about to write about, probably. 🙂

Flash forward to a mom of three in her early thirties who still believes in not complaining too much about health: I become suddenly, very ill. Suddenly, I find it hard to be awake more than a few hours a day and continually catch a light flu that goes away for no more than a few days at a time. The bottoms of my feet hurt, and my eyes sting. I can't think clearly. I have hours of school lines in the afternoons, in which I try to close my eyes for a while, but often I'm in tears and every little thing seems magnified. I'm praying to just get them home and trying to make sure they can't see how less available to them I've become.

I go to doctors who humiliate me and make it seem my fault or imagination. I'm too young to be doing so much. I'm just tired.

And on top of that, I feel like a horrible person, don't really even believe myself until after almost a year a doctor finally takes blood tests that show what he diagnoses as systemic Lupus. He holds his fingers apart in front of my face and says "Most people live in this range", then pushes them into a narrow channel, "But you will live in here." For ten years my life becomes more doctors offices than restaurants and constant health management, constant health talk and learning to complain about what hurts and where on the pain scale this or that sensation falls.

I change my life and in dramatic ways, noticing that there are psychological components, like days of weakness after dealing with family dramas, or constant tension I hold when certain people are around. I begin to eat what's good for me, rather than what others prefer. I'm on high alert when my in-laws remark to my then husband one day "She never gets angry" so begin learning to get angry, express boundaries. It's a clumsy process. I go to therapy, to accupuncturists.

I learn to meditate.

The diagnoses is first questioned and then doubted. My blood work clears, and I learn to live with flares of "some kind of manageable auto-immune disorder" I take seriously and communicate about. I later even take on a physical job, standing and running around for sometimes seven or eight hours a day. I come home and watch TV to wind down because my legs hurt, my eyes hurt, I'm full of little irritations.

And I complain. Or, is it complaining if it has a clear purpose?

I express what I'm feeling as a way of keeping others near. I ask "Do you want to watch this show together while I get off my feet for a while?" "I'm going to close my eyes a little, but I'm listening, please go on." "I'm going to cook something that should last three days, since I have a long day tomorrow and will want to rest." "I probably can't do the Farmers Market the day after we go to the gardens, but we can plan for next week." This is my inner dialog too, to myself, too. I try to talk to myself like a loving parent would, include myself in the kind of love I have for others, for my kids. It works. Honestly.

And is probably what my mother needed, too.