Into Every Life A Little Pain Must Fall

I absorb all the space that pain takes up in my relationships with men I love. As a woman, I don’t think I am alone in this. For a lot of us, pain comes with the womanly package: monthly menstrual pain, the pain of childbirth, the pain of abuse and oppression for our collective (and in some countries, current) female lineage is embedded in our DNA. We are accustomed to pain in our bodies. Therefore, (I tell myself) I really can't be assigned any blame for absorbing it. In addition, I am a mother. How many years did I magically make my son's pain go away with nothing more than a kiss? We're moms. We don't want our children to hurt.

But at what point does absorbing the hurt for our child cause them more pain?

I think as women, (okay as one woman) I/we took it too far. I have spent my mom lifetime with my pain antenna poised at the ready to zero in on and absorb any kind of pain (with the ferocity of the newest high voltage vacuum cleaner) that comes my son's way. And doing it feels just as natural and routine as running my Dyson under the couch and sucking up all those free-floating dust bunnies.

The problem is that turbo vacuuming is great for cleaning the Berber. Not so great for living a life, or sharing one.

Last night, I watched as my son regressed into some old and non-productive escape behaviors (web surfing and hiding out in his room). I felt a definite shift in his energy, but he acted fine. I, on the other hand, felt a wave of disappointment and sadness. I tried to find an answer to his energy shift. I tried to engage him so I could make it all better. Did he fail a test? Have a bad experience at school? Feel defeated for any reason??

His response? A grunt or two (peppered with a growing annoyance at me for continuing to pop my head into his room). My inner knowing told me to leave him alone, but then I found my body PLOP! smack dab in the middle of his space. Never gave him an inch or a moment to reflect on his pain.

This morning I woke up feeling a deeper sadness with a more profound level of disappointment sprinkled with a new feeling…worthlessness. I took a deep breath and acknowledged what I already knew. These are not my feelings. I think they belong to my son. I think this is how he is feeling.

And my grabbing it away from him may have made it worse.

Rather than allow his feelings to be in his internal space so he could breathe into them and own them in his own time, I absorbed them, identified with them, gave them permission to run rampant in my body and call themselves me. Let’s be honest here. I wasn't only trying to help him; I was trying to make his pain go away so I could feel better, too.

I gave my son some space this morning. I asked for his permission to have a conversation instead of an interrogation. We met in a space that felt fertile, safe, and ours alone. I apologized for taking what belonged to him, and he opened the door to his painful feelings. It's a beginning...for him and for me.

I also shared a precious secret with him that most men don't know. Into every life a little pain must fall because we know, as women, that new life does not happen without it.