Wednesday, March 01, 2006

An emotional outpouring....sorry

Man, I just feel so busy all the sudden and it isn't even soccer season or summer!!!! Work, birthdays, errands, juggling teenage problems and elementary school problems, and dr. appointments. Geez I need a vacation.

So, an update on our daughter. After all is said and done, it seems to have been mono all along! Whew, thank God. At least that is what the tests indicated and that is what the doc is going with. So as we take it at face value because at least its an answer, the stress of that is easing. I guess I didn't realize how much it was really eating me up inside and how worked up Pat and I had become over all of it. Tension was very high in this house for a couple weeks there and I have to chalk it up to the 'unknown' outcome of our child. Each day I feel like a weight is being lifted from our hearts. Our poor daughter has just been beside herself with worry!

For as much as one wants to believe that things aren't bothering them that much and putting on the air that everything will be just fine, it is the sub concious that is quietly eating up all that positive energy! When the bomb drops it drops suddenly without warning. As I said in my previous post on this, Pat and I didn't talk about it that much and we still aren't even after the results have come in. We hadn't really addressed our feelings, kind of just kept them to ourselves.

Emotions, man they are really messed up things. I remember when our daughter broke her leg. I crawled into a shell and spoke to no one. In my mind, no one understood how that incident tore me apart, especially Pat. The old cliche, 'He was a guy', how could he know the complexities of my feelings of being named a child abuser and the immense guilt that I felt because I was there and didn't know what happened to my own child? How could he understand the impact of a woman telling me that my baby was no longer mine and that they were going to put me in jail no matter what it took and take away my other baby? Perhaps I felt some anger towards him because this was the one time that he couldn't help me but the man stood behind me 100%. He never waivered in the belief that I would never hurt our child. He fought for me from moment one.

God, how wrong I was about Pat, he was my biggest support system but I was just too blind to see it at the time. Too wrapped up in my own grief! He was a solid rock throughout all of it. The worst part about all that that took me YEARS to realize is not once in that whole ordeal did I ever ask Pat his feelings about that? How that whole thing affected him? I will never forgive myself for being so damn selfish and self absorbed but know that Pat forgave me long before I ever realized my mistake! Without me ever asking him or apologizing, he felt my pain, he felt his own pain.

It seems that those we are closest to are the last people on earth that we would expect any understanding from! I don't know that the many pains and emotions will ever go away from this incident. But I do know that my system shut down just as it did with the scare we just experienced with this same daughter, ironically. That I shut Pat out, that I sank into that same familiar, and eerily comfortable hole and hid. And Pat did the same thing. Perhaps it's just that unknown that causes the downward spiral, perhaps it's that fear of what my be the future, building a whole new realm of life changing events in the face of preparation for what may come.

Funny how our emotions run our lives. Most would say that we should run them. However, it's that subconscious mind that seems to take over and attack, at least that is how I see it. No matter how hard I have tried to control the fear that I had with my daughter and all these blood tests, somehow, some way, my strength was just a ruse to cover up something that seemed to have absolutely no control over. But now I can let that fear go. She is going to be fine. I have always felt very blessed to have four beautiful and healthy children. Of course I am the biggest pessimist to walk the earth and think the glass is always half empty. Perhaps one day, that will change!

Thank you all for your concern and your emails with this. And for the extension of an ear or a friend if one was needed. Opening up to the support of others is definately not something that I do really well but with this blog, well, I only open myself up to the world, to the open arms of a support system that is overwhelming. What a comfort that is!

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