Tag: sympathy

Sorry Your Head Hurts, Do You Want Something to Eat?

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“I am becoming water; I let everything rinse its grief in me and reflect as much light as I can.” – Mark Nepo

Last night we were having dinner on my brother’s World War II era tugboat. He has lovingly renovated it over more than 20 years so that it’s very comfortable for him and my sister-in-law to live on, but it still has a lot of steel edges to bump into. Which is what happened – my 2-year-old son was looking out a port hole, stood up quickly and bonked his head. My sister-in-law was standing there with me, saw him do it and as I picked him up, showered him with sympathy.

But 30 seconds later (maybe longer but not much), my sister-in-law said to my son, “What’s the matter, Buddy? Are you hungry?”

It struck me as a common thing we do as humans. It’s hard to witness someone else’s pain. So we express sympathy and then we are ready to move on. Three things strike me about this.

First, we often move to trying to solve the problem. I find this impulse, especially as a parent, to be so alluring.

Second, if things last longer than we expect, we try to conflate the pain with something else as my sister-in-law did. Is it not surprising that we grow up confused about what our feelings are if the grown-ups around us think that what is wrong is that we are hungry when really our head hurts?

Third, we compound the original pain with our discomfort at sitting with someone in pain. So that they often are moved to pretend the pain has stopped so that they don’t have to contend with both their own pain and the pain of the people who are witnessing it.

It’s hard but sometimes the best thing to do when someone is in pain, is just sit with them. As a mom, I want to reach for the ice pack, the bandage or the song but I’m working on just letting the tears fall onto my arms as I hold them. We have to clean our wounds before we bandage them and, in a way, letting the injured party cry for as long as necessary is the best first step.

In Feeling

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“The problem with this world is that we draw our family circle too small.” – Mother Teresa

Here’s the way sickness travels in my family. One kid gets sick, the other one gets it and then finally I get sick. Fortunately, I don’t always get sick but if I do, I’ll be last to get it. And when I do, I learn how brave my kids have been.

This time it was my daughter who got a stomach bug first last weekend. She spit up a few times and then said, “Wow, I’ve never thrown up 4 times in a day before. When are we going to go hiking?” I replied that I thought she might want to rest given that she didn’t feel well. She exclaimed she felt fine so we went.

Then my son got it mid-week. It was very clear because I opened his door to get him out of his crib in the morning, and instantly got hit with the smell. “I sneezed it out!” he exclaimed, not all that upset. He stayed home from school but he too said he felt “good” and was pretty peppy playing around all day.

I thought I’d avoided getting it too until this weekend when my body, probably exhausted from all the cleaning, just gave up and succumbed. I wondered how the heck my kids were so delightful when their bodies were fighting this bug. It always looks easier when someone else is doing it, doesn’t it? As usually happens with getting sick, it comes with a huge heap of humility and admiration too.

This made me think of the words sympathy and empathy. Sympathy from the Greek of sun (with) + pathos (feeling). Oxford languages defines sympathy understanding between people, common feeling.  

Empathy, a word I hear so often these days in conjunction with raising emotionally intelligent kids, is from the Greek of em (in) + pathos (feeling). It is defined by Oxford languages as the ability to understand the feelings of another.

In my little family we have so many opportunities to have sympathy for each other because we share so much context at this stage – the people we know, the many hours we spend all together, the illnesses we pass along. It may be the easiest time for us to all stand in common feeling. And if we get that right, at least some of the time, it helps us become more empathetic toward others because we have the family experience of feeling understood.

The other thing I was reminded of as the illness ran its course is how much energy I spend resisting being sick. I didn’t want to throw up and I managed not to. But in hindsight, it may have made it last longer overall. Sometimes we just have to let the bad out so that the healing can begin, a lesson I keep having to repeat.

It’s funny as I type this thinking of my gratitude towards this stomach bug. It created a shared family experience, reminded me that resistance to uncomfortable things is often a harder route to go and most of all, makes me so thankful that we all feel well again. If only there was a virus that could unite our bigger human family….

(featured image photo from Pexels)

Kiss the Pain Goodbye

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“Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.” – Charles Dickens

We’ve had a seemingly unending string of clear, sunny days here in Seattle so I trundled my kids off to the park yesterday morning. My toddler was on his strider bike, my 1st grader on her bike and I was pushing the stroller in case of any breakdowns, mechanical or otherwise. Because my son is new at the strider bike it took us so long to make it to the park four blocks away that the first thing we did when we arrived is to have snacks. We found a perfectly shady bench on this perfectly sunny morning and I started to unzip the cooler bag. My daughter, wanting to be the first to crack open the bread sticks with cheese dip, pushed off to run around the bikes, slipped and fell, crying out as she hit the ground.

I wasn’t very sympathetic. The thoughts that crossed my mind were that she was being careless and greedy to have the first go at the snacks and this might have been the fourth fall already on a Monday morning, fortunately none of them serious enough to even warrant a mark. But I knew that adding hurt feelings to a hurt knee wasn’t going to help so I didn’t say anything and bundled her up and gave it a kiss.

That’s when the grace of the moment dropped in. I had a split second of understanding that the cry and the wanting to be first was not really from the fall but from holding it together as her brother celebrated his second birthday and got all the presents. And that my reaction was from being tired from hosting the second birthday party the night before so that my impatience and judgment were the side effects of pretending that I wasn’t.

I have no idea why humans are such complicated creatures so that what seems to be happening rarely is. But I suspect it is so that we are lured to look deeper. It brings to mind the Buddhist tonglen meditation where you breathe in the pain of those around you and breathe out relief. I find that even when I don’t yet know the true cry of the hurt, it still works. I’m starting to think that maybe that’s why mamas have kissed skinned knees for generations upon generations – so they have a moment to breathe out relief and keep their mouths shut. I found that it works because things are as rarely as perfectly sunny as they seem.