The things that sting

On mothering loss and the angel of pain

Sting

Unexpected
the small pain, the sadness

the still healing tear
	I didn’t know it was there
caught on the edge of my friend’s joy.

“I am eight weeks pregnant”
she says, glowing
unknowing
that I am
three weeks empty.

The tin can,
innocently kicked,
unseen sting
at the edge of the garden.

Sometimes
if pricked too close 
to the heart
even those
without a previous allergy
will become
anaphylactic, suddenly.

We surprise
our own selves
with our incapacity.

Tongue swell
swarm of feeling 
hot skin of tears held back

I hide my grief under
the doormat
	just for the hours of our tea
so she can have her
joy.

The bright stitch, the shock
the clear memory of
my mother 
reassuring me
as a child
that the pain wouldn’t last long

stinger left inside

still born dream

it’s ok
to still 
be grieving.

I wrote this poem nearly three years ago to the day. It’s an anniversary of sorts, an anniversary of a leaving, but also of beginning to heal.

It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently—stings and aches and pains that linger. When you feel them…and when they disappear.

I was talking to a loved one the other day who was still processing how difficult her postpartum had been. She was telling me about a conversation she had had with a newly postpartum friend who reported back that everything was “great!”

She said to me, “I just don’t understand it, how can everything be ‘great’? Like deep, yes, joyful, sure, intense, of course…but great??” I felt her.

I knew what she was experiencing. I’ve felt that ache in my own body. The ache of “why was this so hard for me?” or “what did I do wrong?”, the lonely reverberating intensity of something that shook you to your center, but that didn’t seem to be a part of other people’s experience.

After my miscarriage I felt the sharp pangs every time one of my friends announced they were pregnant. Then, after my daughters birth, I felt it every time someone reported back about their blissful natural delivery. I didn’t want to feel pain, especially not in the aura of other people’s happiness, but I couldn’t help it. The ache was still there.

Pain science tells us that our experience of pain doesn’t live in our body—it lives in our brain.

Our body tells our brain a rupture has happened—a harm, a stress, a wound— and our brain produces the physical experience of pain so we can take the steps we need to protect ourselves.

From a brain science perspective, all pain is protective.

I remind myself of this as I approach my own struggles with chronic pain in this lifetime. Or as I touch the things that still sting within.

In what way is this pain here to protect me?

I tweaked my knee last spring. I didn’t think it was a big deal but then it started hurting me every time I stood up and down. The pain began dictating how I lived my life, what I did and didn’t do. For a while it just became a part of my identity, and I wasn’t sure it would ever go away. But then, somehow, it did.

I don’t even know when, exactly. I just started noticing that the things that used to hurt didn’t anymore. I’d do a certain motion and then remember, much later, that this same thing used to cause an ache. It wasn’t an overnight shift, but an incremental letting go.

Healing from loss, trauma, rupture is like this.

We have the pain until we don’t need it anymore. Until the ligaments are healed. Until the emotional strife has been soothed. Until the part of us that broke with the loss has had time to be put back together.

I think about this as I look ahead to my daughter’s second birthday in January. This time last year I was awaiting the date with trepidation, knowing that I’d have a cascade of feelings come up around the challenging vortex of her birth.

This time last year, I was still in pain.

But now, as the weeks start to roll away to the day of her birth, I don’t feel the same crushing ache. Instead, I feel peace. I feel a bit of wonder at the scars—literal and metaphorical—that are still here. I’m curious.

Sometimes I think that this is the whole purpose of being alive. To experience the rupture, and then the repair. The pain, and then the healing. The loss, and then the spectacular fullness that is existence.

Just like a bad knee, I’m sure sometimes these old pains may act up again. When storms are coming, or if I’ve been standing too long on my feet without relief. But these are messages too. Like the original definition of the word “angel,” which comes from the Greek aggelos—messenger.

Pain is its own kind of angel. If we’re only open to the visitation.

The body has a miraculous ability to heal. So does the spirit.

And pain, like a bee sting, like a winged angel, is protective.

It says—this is worth protecting.

You are worth protecting.

The fragile petal of your spirit deserves to be sheltered

The unbreakable light of who you are is held.

Even in your most pain-filled moments, you have been held through it all.