WHEN IS ENOUGH, ENOUGH?

It’s hard to offer peace to the world around you when you’re doing battle with your own heart. And it’s hard to feel what you need to feel if you’ve labeled some feelings unworthy or unacceptable. What we all need is to feel a little more okay with what is. Not just the pretty, blessed & grateful, but also the gritty, messy & raw. ~VE}

My Sparky boy is so ill. So very ill. The latest? Bacterial Pneumonia. This follows close on the heels of him having the Norovirus & Influenza and a few other unnamed viruses. Add insult to injury, lyme rages on. 8 yrs of hell. No end in sight. Last night it put him in the ER. The degree & extent to which he suffers is maddening. Gutting. I am so angry & so grieved by the sh*t he endures. By day, I find myself storming around the house slamming cupboard doors & cursing under my breath. By night, I weep in a crumpled heap thru the dark. There are no words... only a seething anger burning deep in my bones. 

When is enough, enough?

I have silenced my pain, my brokenness, my rawness. Shut it down. Covered it up. Judged it harshly. Because who wants to put their broken dreams & fragmented faith on display? Who wants to write about the battle in the middle of the battle when your bleeding out & have nothing to offer but raw, embittered rants? What good can come of that? And yet...here I write.  

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. ~Rilke

I cannot be alone in this wasteland, this eternal winter that knows no end. I cannot be the only one who has felt confounded by the horrors of suffering. I cannot be the only one who has felt abandoned by god. Unseen. Unheard. Unloved.  Is this a narrative that was always in me or have years of witnessing the unrelieved, private agony of my child created it? I cannot be the only one who has wrestled with the weight of this. I can't be the only one hemmed in by the bitter, biting assault of suffering.

I cannot be the only one who's kid can go weeks, months, or even years with little to no contact from the outside world. I cannot be the only one who has stopped sharing the hard stuff because I can no longer tolerate the platitudes or praying for you responses. Not when my kid is bleeding out with a soul atrophied from lack of companionship within his suffering. Prayer does not dry tears, bandage wounds or put food on the table. In fact it is salt in the wound - when one has spent years splayed out on the floor praying, begging, pleading for a reprieve to his suffering. And no relief comes. The perceived silence of god broken only by the anguished moanings of my child. No mercy shown.

When is enough, enough?

I  cannot be the only one who feels let down, even abandoned, by the church. I cannot be the only one who violently recoils at the theories on suffering; This'll make you stronger. God must have a really big plan for ur life. There is a purpose to be found in his suffering. Hearing these theories makes me want to vomit. I get that they are meant to comfort but suffering does not make sense & wrapping up the horror of it with a pretty theory bow can be destructive.

So, no, I do not have peace to offer. I have only the raw unbridled questions of a mother whose child lives a tormented existence. One day this may all make sense. But right now it does not. It hasn't for a very long time. And god feels very far away. And I have silenced this agony for far too long. Scared of judgement. Beholden to assumptions that I am strong & full of faith, I've stymied my doubts & hurts fearful giving them a voice would provoke the same in another or offend. The world has enough anger. Why add more? Yet, in doing so, I discount, denounce, & devalue this part of my journey.

This is the battle. In its rawest form.