When someone you love is hurting – your child, partner, friend – you feel the pain too. And you’ll stop at nothing to either make it go away or somehow figure out how to fix it.
There is no greater urge than to protect our kids and loved ones.
It takes root from love, but it grows far beyond and is an amazing thing. What’s also remarkable is how you forget about everything else when you’re on a mission to fix their hurt.
I’m exhausted and coming down with something. Maybe the flu, maybe a cold. I just know I feel it creeping into my chest and throat. It started yesterday and it is an all-over feeling of going down the slope to what will probably end up being a few days of achy misery.
Meanwhile, my son’s back hurt and it has on and off for a while. He missed a few of his lacrosse games and that is very unlike him. He has a high tolerance for pain – a fact I learned when he had a traumatic accident several years ago that left him with multiple injuries. Never a single tear or complaint throughout that entire recovery.
So if he is missing a game, I know it really must be hurting him. I finally took action to schedule an appointment for him to see the doctor. The office appointment, the visit to the hospital for x-rays, the several phone calls and faxes and emails to gather his previous medical records… have (unbelievably) taken a good chunk of the past two days. The same two days where some sort of virus is fighting to take me down.
I am not relating this for a mom award.
We all do these things – and regularly. Some of us for our kids, some of us for our parents, some of us for our friends or partners. The point is that when someone we love is hurting, we’ll stop at nothing to help them feel better. We don’t feel our own hurts when we are busy at trying to fix theirs.
Nothing can stop us.
Not feeling like poop ourselves, not having piles of work to do, not the laundry or the cleaning or the errands or the bills.
Nothing will prevent us from taking whatever actions we can, as quickly as we can, to make them feel better as soon as possible.
It’s like we laser-focus on finding a fix.
The rest of our issues and our to-do lists get sidelined and seem blurry in comparison.
That’s love. Pure and simple.
Feeling their hurt so strongly it hurts ourselves. Doing everything and anything possible to fix it.
The saying goes that the fastest way to feel better yourself is to help someone else. (What flu?!)
It’s so true. And it is a beautiful thing.
– Marlene
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