Quilts of Pain

I can't sleep. Again. This is a fairly common occurrence these days, where I end up laying awake for hours, my mind wandering down alleyways and avenues and boulevards. Sometimes I get stuck in philosophy, sometimes I get stuck thinking about my own life, sometimes a dream keeps me awake or a nightmare, and oftentimes, all of these in one night. It’s amazing to me, how I can lay awake for so long, doing nothing but thinking, sometimes enjoying the feel of one or both of my children cuddled up next to me, other times feeling trapped by it. It can feel like quicksand, trying to get out of bed when two children are using you as a pillow. It is further frustrating that, even on getting up, when I’ve finally given up on the idea of sleep and decide to do something, I am fairly often dragged back or otherwise detained. This article, for example, has so far been interrupted twice and I’m fully expecting more - once when my husband realized I was awake, and pushed for sex, and second when my son woke up and pushed for more cuddles. It’s now the day after I started it initially, and I’m sitting here waiting for my daughter to finish pooping - so that I can once again be interrupted. It seems to be this frequent pattern, that I get started on something - making myself tea, writing an article, reading a chapter in a book, making food for some meal or other - and in the process of trying to do this, my husband, then one kid, then the other kid, will need me for something, and eventually, maybe, that initial activity I attempted might get done. My husband frequently says how multi-tasking is evil and shouldn’t be done and really, truly focusing on your activity is preferential, but I honestly haven’t figured out how to be a mom and NOT multi-task. It seems that to be a mom, I must. The only way I’m doing only two things right now - writing and watching my daughter for signs of being done pooping so I can quickly swoop in before any further messes are made - is that my husband and son are off on their own. And again, as soon as I wrote that, I realized my daughter had fallen asleep on the potty, and I had to help her get to bed. Which means that I stopped writing and it’s now been almost a month since I started. What with moving, unpacking, getting used to living in a new home, a new neighborhood, and a newish city, I can’t seem to find the time to sit down and write.


The initial thing I’d wanted to write about was pain. Interesting that, after all this time - over a month - I can still remember. Despite all the other tasks I’ve done, and not done; all the times I’ve forgotten to close a cabinet or flush the toilet or gotten sidetracked from doing laundry, putting away dishes, etc… I can still remember what I wanted to write about here. Pain. Specifically, the concept of spreading one’s pain. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Perhaps because I’m almost constantly in pain - I’d guess about 75% of the time, I’m in pain. And even when I’m not consciously in pain, I find that often, if I quiet my brain and focus on my body, I am actually in pain I’d just shut it out. I’ve gotten good at shutting out pain, I suppose that’s necessary when it’s so constant. But anyway, back to the idea of spreading it. There are people out there who have been through so much shit. Like, their whole lives have just been pain after pain after pain. Either physical or emotional or both. But despite that, despite all that pain,these people don’t spread it. They face the world with a smile, or at least not a frown, they show kindness and love and joy. But then there are other people who do spread it, like warm butter on toast; they wrap themselves in their pain like a soft, cozy quilt - and in a lot of ways, a quilt of pain seems to offer comfort to these types of people. They seem comfortable in their pain, it's secure; but because it's so prevalent, so predominant, they also pass that quilt around, laying it on others. I don’t think they necessarily intend to spread it, if they do I think that’d qualify them as evil or close to it, but it still gets spread. I do it, I know that. An example, that’s relatively mundane in many ways: my child draws on the walls with a permanent marker. I now must clean the walls, or re-paint them, or pay someone to do either for me; that ‘pain’ I envision experiencing (either from painting, or from scrubbing, or from paying someone to do it - that’s pain, in a very small way but still pain) now leads me to yell at my child. I’ve taken something that hurts me and I’ve spread it, causing pain to my child. Some people might argue I’m justified in getting upset; I don’t know. Am I? My child didn’t do it to piss me off, or to hurt me, or for any malevolent or malicious reason; he simply wanted to color on the walls. It was fun, for him. The fact that it hurts me - do I really have to make it hurt for him, too? I’m not advocating that I should necessarily just clean it up, without any discussion with my child, but I do question my *right* to be angry. It’s understandable, sure, but is it a right? If I ever question my husband on his right he gets even angrier. ‘Don’t deny me my anger’ seems to be a common sentiment. ‘I have a right to my feelings.’ I think there’s a line there, somewhere; yes, you have a right to feel, and I in no way want to squash or oppress feelings. But don’t other people also have the right to not be angered at, for doing something they didn’t know would cause upset? It is a common occurrence for my son to do things that upset other people; he hits, he spits, he screams; but all of these things are done under duress. He cannot control them, or stop himself; so getting angry at him, for doing something he cannot control, seems… counter-intuitive. I would not get angry at a wolf for eating a chicken (ok, I would probably be sad, if it was one of my chickens. Not that I have chickens, I’ve just always wanted chickens, and if I ever get them and a wolf eats one, I’ll be sad. But being angry at a wolf for eating when it’s hungry is pointless. And, in the same vein, getting angry at a child for acting like a child is pointless, or getting angry at a child for having a panic attack and lashing out as a result is pointless…).




Anyway, I am continually getting sidetracked on my thesis here. People spread pain. Why? Why do some people spread it and others don’t? I don’t mean just smiles versus frowns, either. It’s in the language, too, simple things that you don’t think will cause pain but do, judgments in your wording, and they’re said because you’re in pain. My husband constantly tells me how I leave the cupboards open. I don’t realize I’m doing it; I just forget. I have no mechanism in my brain to make me remember. He hits his head on one of those cupboards and gets angry at me. I can’t control it, at least I can’t seem to. I do it more when I’m stressed; I think it is representative of the fact that there’s too much going on in my brain for me to remember a simple thing like closing a cupboard. So, I don’t close them often enough, and then my husband gets hurt, and then he reprimands me. He’d say he doesn’t yell, and I suppose in principle that is accurate; but, in my head, anger and upsetness are felt as a yell. It hurts me the same as a yell. I

know he doesn’t mean to hurt me, just like I don’t mean to hurt him by leaving the cupboards open (half the time that act also hurts me; the number of times I’ve smashed my head into the corner of a cupboard are too many to count). Anyway, that simple reprimand, for me, is enough to hurt me, and now because I’m hurt, I will be more likely to respond with anger when my kids do something like draw on the walls or hit each other or break something or whatever other kid thing they think sounds fun, and my kids get yelled at for a simple kid-thing because *I* left a cupboard open. It’s a cycle and I’m intrigued by it, by why it happens and how we stop it. How *I* stop it, because I firmly believe I am the only one I can control (and even that is questionable, as per the cupboards).




It’s not always simple things, either, like leaving a cupboard open. Sometimes it’s multi-generational. My grandma said/did things to my mom and my mom now has that pain and she said/did things to me as a result of that pain and I now say/do things as a result of my pain and my kids will also, probably, do things as a result of the pain that my grandma inflicted on my mom (and it probably goes back even farther than that, but I have no evidence one way or another). My other grandma was scared of birds, and my dad is scared of birds, and my sister is scared of birds (as far as I know it has not - yet - spread to my kids) and we have this multi-generational (kind of weird) phobia that’s spread downward. Pain begets more pain. I

think, in a similar vein, that joy begets more joy. But for whatever reason, we don’t have a whole lot of joy going around; there’s too much pain being spread, and it seems sometimes that pain is stronger than joy. We start the day on the wrong side of the bed, for whatever reason, and our whole day is ruined. And probably everyone else we come into contact with has a harder day, too, not just in their interaction with us but every second afterward BECAUSE of their interaction with us. No one ever really notices when someone starts the day off full of joy - maybe because most people don’t? Or have we been enculturated NOT to feel joy, or at least not to show it? Is it that there’s too many horrible things to feel/show joy? But there’s also so many wonderful things, like caterpillars turning into butterflies and the way the wind moves through ivy (my son showed me that one) and a simple smile on a two-year-old’s face. Why is it that the pain in the world (the tragedies, the shootings, the car crashes) - why do they always trump the good (the babies being born, the kittens and puppies, the people who got miraculously saved by their dog or their horse or whatever pet is nearby)?




I don’t have any answers, just a whole lot of questions, and I guess I’m just going to leave this article open-ended. Maybe I’ll come back later and finish it; right now my own personal physical pain is making it so I can’t concentrate anymore and I figure I must go to sleep, lest I spread my pain more tomorrow.