Feeling A Child's Pain

The dream woke me with a start. I don't often dream and rarely are my dreams so symbolic of events occurring in my life. Usually they are odd and their meaning unclear. This dream was different. It was startling and didn't help to alleviate my already heavy heart.

I was cradling my newborn baby girl. Under a little tuft of reddish hair, the features below were the features of a child with Downs Syndrome. I touched her cheek and felt surprise at the heat. My baby needed to go to a doctor. As is often the case in dreams, there was a strangeness to my physical surroundings. The landscape I walked on my way to the doctor was desert-like, void of grass, trees or shrubs, mostly brown. The doctor's office was a table set in the middle of these strange, barren surroundings.

I sat on a chair awaiting the doctor's arrival and realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd fed my baby. In that moment, I felt such deep distress at my neglect and feared my milk may have dried up. I unbuttoned my shirt, closed my eyes and pulled my daughter close. She clasped on and greedily sucked. Milk surged and I felt intense relief to be nourishing her.

The doctor examined my baby and I headed home, back through the dreary landscape. On the walk I wiped a smudge of dirt from my daughter's forehead and realized, my baby was several weeks old, and I had never bathed her. When I arrived at our house, Craig opened the door and with tears flowing and feeling absolute anguish and guilt, I handed her to him and asked him, "Why haven't we bathed our baby?" Then I woke up.

My cheeks were damp with tears. The dream left me unsettled, yet I knew exactly why it had come to me. This dream had everything to do with my not being able to make things okay for a grown child. Everything to do with not being able to heal heartache, to heal a child's innermost demons. Everything to do with looking back and wondering whether past decisions may have harmed this child more than helped. Decisions that may have inhibited this child from being able to cope in a grown up world, to resolve grief in a healthy manner.

No one tells you that once you have a child you feel their pain as intensely as they do. I sometimes think you feel it more. When your child is hurt, you hurt. When your child is betrayed, you feel betrayed. When your child is afflicted with their own compulsions and torments, you feel tormented.

When I say I feel his pain, I mean I really physically and emotionally feel his pain. Just as I felt the pain of my other children when life threw them curve balls, when their hearts were broken, when friends betrayed and goals seemed unattainable. I feel the weight heavily on my chest. I feel it in the rolling of my stomach. I feel it in my waking hours and in my dream state.

Raising my children was a gift. One that seemed relatively simple in the early years. I conceived them easily. I bore them easily. I parented with an ease that came naturally. That is, until years later, when I realized what worked for two wasn't necessarily the best for my third. The same expectations, rules, guidelines and instruction weren't as easily accepted by this child of mine. This child who makes his own life more difficult by the choices he makes. So... for years now, alternating with happiness, there has been grief and pain and frustration and love- always love.

And, now this child has had his heart broken and I can't do anything to ease the pain. I can't do anything but listen, comfort, offer steps that will move him forward and help him see that this too shall pass. That in life there are simply walks we must make alone and he is on one of these walks.

In the end, all we really want is for our children to be happy. When they're happy, we're happy. I saw this in my mother and in all the wonderful moms I know who would take the pain from their child if they could. No one ever tells you it will be this hard. They tell you about the joy. The joy that makes all the pain worth it.

So while I carry this weight, I know it will pass. It will pass when my child forges ahead and is happy again.

VSL