Submitted by Dee Tenorio on Wed, 2008-10-29 16:13.
I was talking to my Mom the other morning and we were discussing pain. She got slightly emotional, actually, telling me what a good baby I was, because I didn't cry much, not even when I should have.
When I was two, I got third degree burns on my hands and feet, which thankfully, I don't remember acquiring. It killed a number of nerves and a lot of sensation in all four paws and required massive amounts of gauze while I healed. The tell me I looked like a boxer, with white padded hands and feet and a matching cloth diaper. (I worry, occasionally, if I got to wear anything else at that time, but I digress...)
So, Mom sighs in the here and now, remembering and said something that stayed with me. "You didn't cry and it hurt so much I had to cry for you."
As I look at my daughters, so small and nearly the age I had been at the time, I shudder trying to imagine what it must have been like for her to see me suffer that way. And that's when I realized...it's not the "letting go" part of parenting that's so hard. We all know that's coming. It's the remembering.
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