Can Turtles climb?

[zig]

alright - big deep breath.

i posted that last post - just because... i needed to document this process that got triggered off by KD's "twofold.

I had to take a break - because i didn't just cry fro a bit - i wailed and sobbed and the pain was so bad that i was begging for it to go away

i want to write what i am going through here - if it helps anyone else in their process of unearthing some of their fears. or am i the only one who has carried so many things so deep inside me? i don't know - sometimes i think i am.

so as i was writing about how much i carried the burden of the fear of our s when he was ill - all the 11 years of feeling that i carried it alone came up for me huge and i felt every minute of what i had gone through.

the worst was that for some reason or the other - h was never there at the worst of it - always out of town or unreachable at work, and by time he would get back - s was recovering and all was well. i couldn't get over how many times that happened. and i always felt as if he never could really grasp what s had gone through, nor me. he underplayed it and i never felt validated or reassured for the fear i carried about it. i have never felt as desperate as i have when i would do all i could and the f'ing medication would not work and all the phone calls to the nurse and going back and forth to the doctor. i didn't even know that i had so much fear inside me about it all.

as i was crying harder and harder - i began to feel as if i could finally face this fear - just look it head on and say - i'm not afraid any more, i'm not afraid of s dying , i'm not afraid that i can't take care of him

and then something huge came up from my childhood - when i was around 7. my little 4 yr old brother almost died one day - and it was kind of because of me.

i have never ever thought of it like that - but tonight i saw how deep deep down i carried some sort of guilt about it.

there was a "horror" side to that day - he was bleeding out in a taxi in my mom's arms - and she had taken me to help her - and the taxi driver was frantically driving us from one hospital to the next and they wouldn't take my brother in. i know for people here that is an out of this world thought - inconceivable. but in the early 70's in india - your doctor had to be practicing at that hospital for you to be treated. and we had just moved to that city 2 weeks before and we didn't have a doctor yet. we went to 4 hospitals and they turned us away

all i really remember is my mom sobbing, my brother blue and unconscious and the taxi driver desperately rushing through the traffic.

i was completely calm, changing the towels out and mopping the blood - and i don't think i said very much - i do remember feeling shocked and i do remember that there was a lot of blood everywhere. finally my mom told the guy to take us to my great aunts house - the only person she knew, who called her doctor and whisked my mom and brother off to him and i was sent home to my grandmother who fed me scrambled eggs and put me to bed.

needless to say - my brother is alive and hale and hearty and we've never stopped fighting since

and now i have unearthed the source of my fear about my s. i am finding myself thinking that i have carried the belief that no one can truly help - that i had to take care of it on my own, and that it was somehow my fault (not a conscious thought) that s got ill.

you see he was perfectly healthy until we moved to the states and about a week later, my parents came to visit. h had a kiln firing and was on the night shift. s's crying woke me up at 4 in the morning and he had a fever of 106. h had just come in and gone to sleep. i woke him and said we have to get to the hospital.

he was so groggy that he said can you go with your mom i just have to sleep. i said no problem - i completely understood - i had been in that state countless times before and you really can't move.

while the doctor was checking s out, h stumbled in - he could barely walk he was so tired but he had dragged himself out of bed.

but the deed was done - he had already let me down, in the deep sub-conscious areas of my mind and confirmed that earlier belief that no one else will help.

and so no matter how much my conscious mind reasoned about it, it was my sub-conscious that drove my reactions after that.

sadly s's visit that day - cured his fever - but he picked up RSV - which made him deathly sick at 4 months - (18 infants died that week here in Lawrence, so there was much cause for concern). the doctor told me that if i hadn't picked up on what was going on so early he would have been really in a bad state within hours. for the next 3 weeks h and i watched our s laying on the bed panting non stop until he got better. but that was not the end of it - his lungs were compromised enough that he got pretty bad asthma right after and for the whole winter i couldn't leave the house with him. he wasn't allowed to be outside below 40 degrees. h was in grad school and only came home at night, and since i had just moved to the states - i didn't know a soul.

so i have carried some really deep fears about this - but now that i have unearthed what were earlier fears that compounded these beliefs on which i functioned - i think i may have found the answer to my dilemma.

you are right KD - if you have had the patience to read through this - it was twofold - but probably not in the way you expected.

i don't even know if i have got to the bottom of this yet. all my life i told the story of that day about my brother in a really detached way, never associating myself with it's cause - but today i am facing what was a child's deep hidden guilt about what happened.

and you know suddenly i remember - when h was 5 his mother gave birth to a little boy who died within 48 hrs - and he talks about it in a very detached way....

so we both carried and still carry some deep deep past fears that we were both overwhelmed by. when i think of it in this light - i feel as if i can begin to understand where he is at. his brother died and mine didn't but we both carried it within us. i have never thought of it from this point of view before...

so much healing still....