Life is wonderful and difficult... and I am grateful!

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

I trust you


I remember taking this picture. Elizabeth is in a hanging, pod-shaped hammock. She looks almost angelic in this photo, but she had been so afraid to sit in that hammock, suspended above the safety of ground. I had coaxed her by asking her to "just trust Mommy."

I shared in a recent blog that Elizabeth will need anther bone marrow aspiration done. When the doctor was talking to me, Liz was sitting in the room and hearing our conversation. I assumed she hadn't been listening, though, because she had no reaction to the news in the office and hadn't said anything about it in the two weeks since that appointment.
Liz has always had an amazing ability to calm herself; to mentally take herself away from a situation. More than a handful of times, a nurse has asked the anesthesiologist what he/she has given Elizabeth before sedation or being put to sleep, when she actually hasn't been given anything at all. She just has a way of, it sounds dramatic, but becoming transcendent-like.
So, when she had no reaction to the news I knew we both heard, but assumed she hadn't been listening to, I was relieved and decided to tell her about the procedure when the date drew closer.
Elizabeth had been listening though and told her Therapist that she would need another bone marrow aspiration because her marrow is abnormal. I was shocked and asked her "Why haven't you said anything to me? Don't you have questions? Don't you feel like telling me 'NO WAY, I am not going through that again!'?"
Her response made me cry.... "I know that you know the answers about why I have to have it, Mom. So I just will. I trust you."
I can't tell you how awful things have been between Elizabeth and me lately. She resents me and I am the person she takes out her anger and frustration on. Though she knows I take care of her, she is so young, so she also sees me as the person who allows painful and unfair things to be done to her. She has gone so far as to say that I let "them" (the doctors) hurt her. As a parent, that is such a painful thing to hear my child say. She cannot understand though. She doesn't yet know that as her mom, my instincts take over and when I see her in pain, it takes everything I have to not pick her up from the gurney or pull her from the arms of the OR nurse as she is carried away. She doesn't know that I literally hurt for her; with her and how her words of anger and frustration stab at me. She doesn't know how often I rally others to pray for her or how, in prayer, I plead to take her place if one of us has to have health problems.

But, she does know she can trust me...so much so that when asked to go through all of these things she trusts me enough to say "I just will."

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for sharing this journey with us. I love you and your grateful heart...

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