FATHER PAIN AND MOTHER PANIC

THEN:

Looking back on my girlhood, I think of my parents as experts on many subjects. Not the least of these are pain and panic.

My pop never seemed to be afraid in his life until something happened to my mother or to one of their daughters. In a blind rush of what could only be called panic, he broke the ice over a frozen river and dunked Lila's head under the water to stop a nosebleed that seemed even more stubborn than Pop was. It worked and both my daddy and my sister began to calm down and breathe again.

He told me after giving birth to my second son, "No more babies for us, little girl!"

I looked to my mother for an explanation and she grinned, "Both times you've been in labor we've had to take your dad to the E.R. He can't take any more babies, so that's gotta be your last one." She laughed and I helped her. It was funny. Dad was so rarely afraid that we could not help but chuckle after he had recovered from a fright.

Mother knew some pain. She grown up more malnourished and sickly than any of her daughters. She had her share of toothaches, stomachaches, child birth, and almost every pain imaginable to womankind except headaches. My mother had one headache in her entire life and it came when she was in her 70s and it was drug induced. I was the headache queen around our place and I think my frequent headaches puzzled her as much as her lack of headaches puzzled me.

But my parents were only novices floundering around now and then in each others field. We girls knew, Daddy was the expert on pain and Momma was much more adept with panic. Sometimes she handled panic in ways we preferred not to emulate. None of us wanted to go to bed and practically stay there, but often we gleaned good examples from her when it came to dealing with fear.


PAIN:

Dad lived for many years of his life with large and constant issues from ulcers. The exit to his stomach was blocked by the boils, and he was in near constant pain. His stomach was "sick"; he belched and scowled a lot; he held his gut; he sucked down the plop, plop, fizz, fizz medicine like candy. And yet, all of this was such a small part of who he was. He didn't let the pain slow him down much, let alone stop him. We caught a glimpse now and then of the scowl before he wiped it from his face. We saw him clutching his stomach when he did not yet realize we had walked up on him. We knew he vomited more than once on most days. Usually, if he ate it was only a short time before he would lose the contents of his stomach. Often he put off eating because it was such an unpleasant experience, full of pain and the revolting act of vomiting. There was always a place on our land that we stayed away from because we had discovered that it was where Pop went to spill his stomach. He tried to hang on to the food he ate for as long as he could, hoping to pull some nutrients from it, hoping some of the food would make it out of his stomach and into his intestines before he got too sick. He didn't weigh much over a hundred pounds, but we girls knew, it was a hundred plus pounds of pure determination.

He told me more than once, "Any pain that I can hold my breath through, I can take. If it lasts longer than I can hold my breath, then I might groan a bit." To my Daddy, groaning or any verbal reaction, was the opposite of "taking". I learned to do the same. At three years old I held my breath through injections and the nurses told my pop with wide eyes, "I've never seen a baby that little take a shot and not cry." I could see the pride in my daddy's eyes any time someone praised my strength and it happened more and more as the years wore on. He would tell them my maiden name, as if that explained it all. They often nodded and so, in my mind, the name became synonymous with "tough".

When I was twelve, Dad had surgery that finally freed him from the ulcers but not from pain. Since that time has had brain surgery, open heart surgery, many bouts of strep throat, pneumonia, bronchitis, and almost constant and often sever headaches. If he says he is hurting, we all jump, knowing he was hurting ages before he admitted to the pain. He is now in his 80s, and to this day, the nurses marvel over how well he handles pain. My Pop cornered the market on dealing with physical pain.

In his shadow, I have watched and learned. I've made it through not only a blue dozen needles at the doctor's office, but also stepping on countless nails and cigarette butts, being thrown from horseback, losing teeth from blows, meningitis - complete with two spinal taps, shingles at the ripe old age of fourteen, a spinal injury, two pregnancies, two natural deliveries, kidney stones, arthritis, an ectopic pregnancy, three surgeries, a myriad of procedures, migraine headaches, an abusive marriage, and much more. If I had not been gifted with his example, I might long ago have given in and groaned! Okay, I have groaned a bit, but much less than you might expect.

A nurse once told my first mother in law, Nina (after I had just underwent surgery) "I've never seen anyone get up so soon after this kind of surgery."

I looked at Nina and my eyes asked, "How well do you know me?"

My mother in law said, "Well, let me introduce you to E.R.'s daughter... She's a strong woman. Nothing keeps her down very long."

And I smiled. She knew me pretty well.


PANIC:

My mother was the expert on fear. She grew up under threat of almost every abuse known to man, and I'm betting that sometimes the dread of it was as bad as the event itself. She lived and grew with fear in her heart, in her eyes, in her thoughts, in nearly every minute of her day. She conquered it when she could. She went to bed and relied on Poe's "little slices of death" to escape it when she had to. Mother knew fear.

Her strength came with her anger. She had taught herself to channel any fear that came and roll it into a fierce and furious rage. How dare they try to hurt her! How dare they try to hurt her sisters! Her husband! Her daughters! Righteous anger saw her through many a panic and she taught that fury to her children as well. We were apt pupils, especially Lila and myself. Sandi can channel rage when she must, but Lila and I nearly bathed in it.

"I can't stand to see anyone pick on someone smaller than they are!" Momma said.
And quick as a wink, her daughters became the defenders of the underdog.

"You don't believe an adult over a child, just because the child is a child and the adult is an adult. That child is probably much more truthful than any adult is!"
And my sisters and I became fierce advocates for children.

"You are sisters! You fight FOR each other not WITH each other."
And we became a unit that only God could tear apart, our strength more than tripled. Synergy became a beautiful thing.

She said, "You might be little, but you are LOUD!"
Pop added with a wry grin, "Dynamite comes in small packages."
And we stood up for ourselves as well as the weak and innocent. We faced, seemingly without fear, bullies of every size and fashion. Our tempers became a known and dreaded thing.

I watched my mother lose her mind with rage, and then (filled with a sort of frightful anger) I emulated that insane rage when the biggest of them came at me. It scared off every female bully that came my way and most of the male ones.

Mother's channeling panic into fury got me through every bulling experience of my life, which was considerable. It got both Lila and myself through abusive relationships. It helped with many other fears, though it's much harder to channel anger when you can't figure out who to be angry at. When I lost my baby, I raged at life. When I had viscous nosebleeds, I became angry with myself for not taking better care of my health. I was afraid and furious!

Momma taught us to deal with fear, to survive it as she had survived it. That's the good side to her expertise with panic. On the flip side, she taught us to worry, to predict fear and negativity in order to be prepared for it. In a polar opposite of Dad, she voiced everything. It were as though she thought that talking about her fears might lessen them. If that ever worked for her, I could not tell that it did. And it firmly does not work for me! The soundtrack of my life was often the voice of my mother worrying aloud, predicting the worst, bracing herself for the disappointments and heartaches that she considered unavoidable. I resented and rejected that. I made up my mind early that I would deal with pain and panic without talking about it. But her spoken fears became my inner voice, like it or not. Her pessimism became the little red guy sitting on my shoulder whispering horrors in my ear. I heard all the dark, dangerous, possibilities roll over and over and around and around in my brain. I still do. I look at the worst case scenarios, while trying to make a more optimistic person of myself. For many years, I resented her negative voice hanging out inside my brain. I still do sometimes, to be quite honest, but I now realize that my mother gave me what she thought I needed; she gave me the best she could, the best she had. Her words and example told us: "Brace yourself and get very angry." I think it was the motto that helped her survive life, and she hoped it would work for her daughters as well. In many ways it has.

In great part, it backfired on her though. Two of her daughters turned our anger on the motto because it so frightened us. And logically enough, turned our anger on the voice the motto used, the source that it sprang from. I spent years angry at my mother, with neither of us understanding that she and my dad had both taught me to reject and rage at my weaknesses, at the things that frightened me, at the words of doom that spoke in my head using my mother's voice.

These days, I try to laugh away the worst of my imaginings (no small feat that!) so that I can tell myself, "I'm just a realist, not a pessimist." I put on such a good show of being an optimist that most people consider me "bubbly," and "happy," and even "sweet". They do not know the battles I wage inside my own head, the negativity I try to drown with The Beatles, and Johnny Cash, and Barbra Steisand, and stiff cups of green tea, and long sessions with words.  I have learned that mother gave me the voice, but she also gave me the strength to face it and so many outside forces. Through the years I've worked on lessening the devil on my shoulder that says, "What if the car wrecks?" But, I must admit, I still hear him, and I've got a plan B for most disasters. Is all the wear and tear on my psyche worth it? Probably not, but I can't seem to make the little guy go away, or hush, or even whisper. As a result, I'm as ready for the rejection of friends and loved ones, the zombie apocalypse, the crash of society, and the death of any (honestly, of all) family members, as I suppose anyone could ever be. I still resent it because it's like pseudo suffering through things I may never have to suffer through in reality. But the little guy drones on, and so does the strength my parents taught me, and my now giant adoration for both of them.