This Feels Exactly Like This Feels.

How to love what is, even when it's really hard.

When I argue with reality I lose- but only 100% of the time.

-Byron Katie

I have been in a fight with reality this week, and unsurprisingly I am losing both the battle and the war. Which is to say, I am punching myself in the face repeatedly, and then lamenting the fact that I am covered in bruises. Why do we do this? Why do we insist on wrestling with what is?

I wish this wasn’t happening.

This is taking too long.

I’d be so much happier if….

This wasn’t supposed to be so hard.

I should be calmer, more grounded, more in control of my emotions.

My thoughts have been looping and looping, robbing me of any peace of mind at all.

Anyone with me?

I have been wanting to sit down and write for days, and every time I find a quiet moment and I pull out my laptop, my mind sublimates into vapor. The once solid framework of my thoughts rise like mist and I find myself staring at the blinking vertical line in front of me, unable to produce a single coherent sentence.

The reality is that I am exhausted.

The story that I have crafted is that I should not be. Or that, even though my eyes feel grainy and my head is pounding, I ought to be able to push through it. To produce something in spite of the bone-weary heaviness.

Imagine this, dear reader. Imagine that you have a bright, beautiful little girl who is right on the brink of her fifth birthday, and she cannot breathe at night. Indeed, she has not been able to get sufficient air into her lungs whilst asleep for many months. You suspect the problem is her tonsils, or perhaps the adenoid gland further up her nose, but you’ve had difficulty getting the greater medical community to confirm this with any kind of urgency. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” they say, setting down their clipboards. “Let us know if it gets worse.”

You would very much like them to take seriously your concerns about the fact that when you stand over her bed at night, you can see her diaphragm contracting inward over and over again without expanding, like a fish out of water, until she suddenly tilts her chin up and to the right, and wakes herself up, gasping for air. You want to shake them and tell them how she complains of headaches and dizziness first thing in the morning, her head still on the pillow, and how she naps for hours in the afternoon despite the fact that her peers have mostly outgrown the need for daytime sleep.

It’s a terrible thing, needing to rattle cages in order to be taken seriously, especially when your child is the one in the cage and the people holding the keys are disinclined to take seriously the furrowed brow of a mother who was taught she ought not demand more of a person than they are comfortable with giving.

Alas, watching my daughter struggle to breathe every moment of every damn night emboldened me to be the kind of mother who called the specialist’s office daily until I finally, thankfully, got my daughter scheduled for a tonsillectomy. And then I kept calling until they rescheduled it more imminently. I think they were just sick of writing my name on post-it notes.

Last week, while my husband and I were half-heartedly watching Bluey in the hospital waiting room after having watched a nurse wheel away our girl and her favorite stuffed kitty cat just about thirty minutes prior, the surgeon called me from the operating chamber and told me that my daughter’s tonsils had been freakishly large. “I don’t usually say things like that,” he said, laughing a little under his breath. “This was not a sham surgery, ma’am. The tonsils had flat vertical planes where they had been pressed together in her throat. It’s a wonder she could breathe. Her life is going to be significantly different after this.”

Relief. Validation. A touch of I-told-you-so. More relief. A flood of emotions.

The thing they don’t tell you is how intense recovery is from this kind of operation. They’re happy to inform you that the surgery is quick, “It’ll be over in 20 minutes! In and out!” But they fail to mention that those twenty minutes under the expert care of the surgeon will leave you, the inexperienced parent, in charge of round-the-clock pain management for a full fourteen days. The hospital staff want your kid out of the door before the anesthetic fully wears off, before the pain kicks in. They don’t have time for that business.

Alas, I am exhausted. And I’m only on day nine.

The most fun part of all of this- the thing that was a true surprise- is that on day seven, the night terrors started up.

What’s that? Night terrors? Is that common? You ask.

Apparently, it is.

Here’s a bit of science for you (I’ve been googling “night terrors post-tonsillectomy” quite veraciously these days, so I’m basically an expert now): When we sleep, we cycle through five stages on a loop throughout the night. Here, I’ll give you a diagram, just for kicks.

Interesting, right? When a person has sleep apnea due to a restricted airway, however, the body cycles in and out of light sleep all night, rarely dipping into the deeper, restorative sleep in stages four and five, because in those later stages the body’s muscles relax and this is dangerous for a person who needs to be in a particular position in order to open up their decidedly small airway.

All of this to say, my sweet little girl hasn’t been experiencing REM sleep for quite some time. And, now that she finally is, with her freakishly large tonsils out of the picture, her brain has no idea how to go from stage five back to stage one again. This is apparently a thing that needs to be re-learned.

In the meantime, she wakes up every two hours throughout the night in the throes of night terrors. This is a disorienting cognitive moment of sheer terror and misery. She thrashes and screams, cries and drools, kicks and punches at anything nearby, and rages in the most heart-breaking and impressive of ways. The sessions last about 20 minutes, and they happen all night long.

And I have been fighting with this reality tooth and nail.

I wish this wasn’t happening.

This is taking too long.

I’d be so much happier if….

This wasn’t supposed to be so hard.

I should be calmer, more grounded, more in control of my emotions.

Can you picture me there, in her room, the dragon night light in the corner casting an eerie green glow on the walls as I struggle to maintain my composure? As I try and fail and try and fail to calm her down? Do you see me? My hair a tangled mess, my heavily lidded eyes like sandpaper, leaning on the rail of her bed as I spoon ice chips into her mouth? Have you ever felt like this, dear reader? If not exactly this, have you ever felt like you would rather be anywhere else but where you have landed in that particular moment?

Of course you have. This is what it is to be human.

But it seems that we humans rage against the reality of such moments with such alacrity that the raging itself becomes more unbearable than the reality.

I listened to a podcast at work yesterday called Death Fists Feels by Rob Bell, and he talked about this mantra that has been incredibly helpful to him in moments such as these. He tells himself, over and over on a loop, “This feels exactly like this feels.”

Instead of telling myself that I should be feeling some other way, or that if I was someone else, someone stronger or someone who meditated more regularly or someone more spiritually evolved I would be able to manage my emotions better, I could try just telling myself, “This feels exactly like this feels.”

This feels like exhaustion, my love.

This feels exactly like helplessness/resentment/fear/impatience.

You nailed it, baby doll. This is what all of those emotions feel like, swirling around inside of you, in the middle of the night standing over your daughter’s bed while you spoon ice chips into her mouth as she wails.

Pull up a chair. Settle into it. Let all of those very valid feelings percolate through your weary bones. This is what it feels like. This is the night you have been given, sweet pea. Let’s try, just for a moment, not to judge it, not to resist it. Also, let’s not minimize it, okay? This is really hard. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is what this particular flavor of hard tastes like.

Here we are. This is it. It cannot be any different than this, so just be here in all the messy glory of it. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.

And suddenly, I feel the swirling subside. The exhaustion is still there, and I can no more change my circumstances than I could in the moments preceding this little session of total acceptance, but there is a newfound peace settling in to my body, and an unexpected glimmer of humor as well. What a ridiculous situation, I think, a tiny smile pulling at the corner of my mouth.

Eventually, my daughter quiets down and curls up and drops into a deep sleep. Her body relaxes, and I notice that now that she no longer needs to tilt her chin way up and to the right to breathe, she likes to put her hand under her little cheek while she sleeps, just like her dad always does.

And that moment feels sacred to me, standing there in the green glow, watching her sleep soundly for the first time in so long. Watching her chest rise and fall steadily. The absence of any sound at all.

This feels exactly like this feels.

Peace, gratitude, wonder. Even with a headache. Even with legs like lead. Even knowing that round three is just a couple of hours away.

Here I am, trying my best to love what is, rather than what I think it should be.

Care to join me? What are you in a fight with reality about at the moment? I’d love to know in the comments. Let’s pull up a chair together and settle in, shall we?