A Place for Pain

                                                           Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash


A Place for Mom ... you've seen the ads, right? They offer in-home care services for your beloved, if not doddering and diminishing, mother whom you would prefer to outsource, thank you very much, because you're busy living your best life and no thanks to your mother. 

I didn't have to make that difficult choice for dearest mommy, a Jewish woman with the sensitivity of a Nazi Schutzstaffel guard. She went out on her own terms. But it occurred to me that I have, over the course of my life, created (even harbored and held onto) A Place for Pain. In a journal entry from September of 2017, I wrote: 

The issue today is abandonment. No, that's not right, the issue is anger. The day has turned into night and and time is running out and my anger is stuck in my leg masquerading as pain. Rather than let it rip, I turn my anger inward, cradling it, a commodity I can't sell but I can transmute (like Christ!) into pain. Having not been allowed to express anger in my family-of-origin home—a home that was mostly silent, lined with eggshells and hollow hearts—that emotion remains baked in the cake. It has to live somewhere, so why not my leg?