Concentrating on the Hurt

When I was young, I hated shots. What kid didn’t? I hated knee scrapes of which I had a TON. Still have so many scars on my knees to attest to my tomboy nature. I hated the hydrogen peroxide that followed the knee scrapes, it hurt worse than the bloody knee!

Basically I hated anything to do with pain. 

As I got to be a teen, I still whined a lot about things that hurt. Then one day when I was deep in my own whining, my mom whisked me out of the room where all my younger siblings were playing and took me into our laundry room.

That room was always quite sound proof—with the laundry of ten people lining the walls and the constantly running machines. Seriously, lots of dirty smelly clothes, but sound proof. So much so that one of my younger brothers used to go in there and nap, probably dozing to the soft hum of droning machines. 

But now? My mom’s look was stern, her body language like a lioness about to pounce. When she closed the door, I knew I was in for it. 

If you knew my mom, she rarely got angry. After growing up with three older brothers on a ranch, she was pretty much immune to everything. So when the lioness appeared you knew you were about to be handed your lunch. 

She simply said, “If you focus on the hurt, that’s all you’ll see!”

She swung the door open and left me there listening to the purr of the dryer. 

Of course, my teenage brain thought her advice quite trivial. You can’t see hurt, you feel it. What does she know anyway? I shrugged it off, but didn’t whine in front of her for quite a while after that. 

Now, so many years later, I get it. Life has a way of beating us down sometimes. We are constantly bombarded by the stress, by others who are stressed, by the demands of this life.

There is no doubt we begin to carry all of that stress on ourselves. There are times when we begin to think the world is against us. The thought occurs to us that people are just simply oblivious to our needs. The next step is to think that possibly they are doing things intentionally because how could they possibly not see our hurt? And lastly we begin to believe our own drama far outweighs anyone else’s.

I’ve been totally guilty of this before and was recently smacked in the face with my mom’s lesson yet again.

I’ve been carrying too much hurt. I’ve let others’ words and my own degraded perception of myself drag me down. Just what the devil wants. 

Well, kiss my you know what. 

My husband says, the first thing to do to get out of hole is to stop digging. 

Why won’t that annoying Disney song, “Let It Go,” stop droning in my head? 

Letting go of the hurt, climbing out of the hole and taking my mom’s other advice:

“It’s okay to be sad, but if you’re sad all the time, you’re not doing enough for others.”

Is it possible to feel my mom’s pounce from heaven? ‘Cause I think I just did.