Today I am weary.
Frustrated.
Tired.
Lonely.
Depressed.
I am out of my skull from boredom and pain relievers and muscle relaxers for my lower back. They make me feel like not my ordinary self. I want to be cheerful and happy and busy.
I wear a path between stuck in bed or a lounge chair, because my back has failed me. I ask my husband if I can PLEASE do something constructive like fold laundry that is piled on a bed and all have to do is stand. He can put the rest away. His answer is a generous "yes" if my back does not strain. The problem is that the sciatic nerve in my left buttock DOES strain. I HATE this.
My husband wakes up in the morning when the clock radio goes off, and snuggles his bare skin next to mine, his arm draped over my shoulder or hip. We listen to the Australian radio personality Red Simonds who thinks he's a great wit. Sometimes he is and other times I think he's an idiot. The other day his topic was a discussion of "fog" in areas versus "fogs." Please. Give me a break. When I'm in pain, this hardly matters. Why not discuss modern-day cannibals? Steve easily rolls out of bed for another day of work and taking care of me.
My back hurts. Not just hurts. It's an agony of pain. I want to find a place in the yard and dig myself into it. It hurts that much. I don't want to shower or brush my teeth or wash my hair. How disgusting is that? I go to the hospital and they give me a shot in the arm that does nothing. So they give me another one. I writhe on the emergency bed on my belly like a snake about to strike someone. Anyone. My cries of agony are muffled into the sanitary pillow between the sanitary sheets. If anyone touches me, I may just bite after all.
For years I've suffered minor back discomfort and numbness in the left leg and tingling in toes, but it's never been that big of a deal. Of course, I never saw a doctor. I was a single woman with a single woman's medical care in the good old USA. How could I afford to see a doctor? Why would I worry if it was something that was intermittent and also something I couldn't afford? I could gently stretch the sore back for a while, rest, and be "okay." Take a day off of work now and then.
But in Australia under a National Health Plan where it doesn't matter if you're single and have a low-paying job, health care is a given. Everyone goes. At the clinic I go to, I present a national card (as a "temporary permanent"resident) , and my treatment is free. Medications are inexpensive. My doctor said I sustained severe injuries to my lower back several years ago...what happened, he asked me? Who hit me, he said? Who beat me, he wondered out loud.
I thought about my step-father who kicked my back repeatedly with his boots after he ripped off my t-shirt from the front neck down while I tried to stumble away from him up a flight of stairs to escape while he shouted at me that I was a whore because I had a crush on a boy. I was 12 years old.
I thought about my mother who slammed my spine, pounding her hands onto my shoulders, onto a wooden chair when she wanted to know which boy I was talking to after school. I was 13.
I remembered both mother and step-father throwing me onto a floor, into walls and over and over and over again punching and kicking me while they told me not to be interested in seeing boys. I was barely 14.
So when the doctor asked me how I was hurt. I honestly couldn't answer. Who knows? There were so many more incidents than those. I remember a few. Actually, when I need to, I remember a lot. I choose not to.
Anyway, my Australian medications are less than $100 USA. It doesn't matter now that my parents or anyone else hurt me. I live in Australia married to a True Blue Aussie. And I couldn't be happier.
My lower lumbar spine will heal. Eventually. Other things will take some time.
But what really saddens me is that countries appear to take less care of their own citizens not only in health care, but in domestic care. Especially when it comes to violence...between parents and children or siblings against each other.
My closest friend has recently been told by the court that she has to let her two youngest children visit their violent father who has a felony conviction of Domestic Violence Assualt and Unlawful Imprisonment. If she doesn't let them go, she will go to jail. This decision in Washington State, was made by a judge two days after the father told someone he was going to kill his wife if she interfered in his seeing those children. They went into hiding.
I am glad God is watching and keeping track.
My body has failed me. For now. I am only 46. But God never has, and He never will. Nor will He fail my friend. No matter what the Court does. And the judge? A newly-elected family man who claims to be a Mormon.
Am I whining?
Absolutely. Yep.
I am frustrated.
its a giant mix of emotions reading this. at times i wondered at the motive; then, almost vicariously i was experiencing the torure myself. the writing is good, the content is drastic. im glad your writing...this is a lum pof clay to continue molding until its perfect.
ReplyDeletelove you
jason
I am reminded of the 73rd Psalm...
ReplyDelete"My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
Thanks be to God that these bodies we dwell in now are temporary, and what ETERNAL bodies we will one day have!
Love you,
-N
Heidi-friend, Today I felt so much lighter after writing my very sad tale of Sacha and the Wolf. I also had a conversation with a dear woman who was hyperventilating in the Post Office. I went to her because I have suffered and having suffered I am done with selfish sin and filled with some compassion: I recognized the familiar signs of trauma. I asked her
ReplyDeleteif she was alright and she turned to me. She breathed spasmodically as she told me her son had died near to this post office where she had to enter in to close out his p.o box. I wept with her and asked if I could help in any way. She said she wished I could but her only suggestion was, "Just love your children." I cried all the way to work. It wasn't because I knew the boy or the mother, but because I knew the pain. If I had not grieved through such pain I would perhaps have been able to overlook her. Perhaps I would have offered some platitudes like putting deodorant on a horse who's been dead 3 days in a heat wave. Would've thought I was doing a kindness.
I headed for work and could not stop thinking of and praying for the woman. Past pain is a stimulus for prayer as well. My very young friend walked in to deliver some more laundry for me. I startled at her basket thumping and then told her about the woman. She grimaced and then related an incongruous story of something she had seen that bothered her. I don't remember it. I just remember thinking that only deep pain digs the wells of compassion. When we are young we have such a tendency to see how things affect our own sensibilities. That is a far cry from where we recognize another's pain immediately and then feel it intensely as if it were our own. We do better healing work in that fellowship of mourning than we would have by our many shallow efforts to discount the emotion of human experience.
I am reminded of the Proverb that says, "If a man loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning, It will be taken as a curse," (27:14). You are a deep woman my Heidi-friend and I grieve at the digging that makes you deeper still because it would not be love to do otherwise. I grieve with you over the devil's work that caused such harm to your fine-china body, even as I rejoice that the Lord is so great He can trade beauty for those ashes. All of the devil's work in people can be forgiven with repentance. The forgiveness is cause for rejoicing in the Lord specifically because the devil's work is so horrible that only God could construct that way of forgiveness. The devil's work, however, is never to be rejoiced, for the forgiveness cannot happen without the mourning over the depravity of that work. You are a help to the abuser when you call sin for what it is and a help to yourself when you mourn over something God so hates that he sacrificed His son to compensate for its horribleness. The mourning only becomes wrong when we don't want to strive for something else or when we try to cover it with other things so that it hides in the dark and fester. We might have thought that once Abel was dead, there was no need to think he had anything to say. But God heard his blood cry from the ground and He said so. God hears our abuse cry from the very air and to think we make it fine by pretending it's not crying out is added sin. Like my relief at letting the Sacha story out of my bones, I believe you will find relief and fellowship with Jesus-of-the-broken-hearted as you let the stories out of your bones.
I know I am only repeating what you know. Your story brought these thoughts to mind and this is my amen. It's late. I'm hard-of-thinking and love ya much.