When parents talk about having a child who is ill or struggling, nonparents often take the wrong message. They think, Thank God I was spared all that pain. If I can’t order up the precise specifications for my child, the condition in which he emerges, the choices he’ll make, if I can’t be assured that he’ll skirt the dangers that await him, maybe it’s better not to have children at all.
Those of us who know the airless terror of the 10 steps between the second you first glimpse your child’s surgeon through the glass doors and the moment he’s standing in front of you, delivering the verdict—we don’t think this way. Each time one of ours is ill or in pain, we think, Thank God I am here for him.
I can only exercise until the crisis is past. When I fell off a roof and injured my back, I did back exercises for several months, until I seemed to have regained my strength. When I smashed my elbow, I did exercises for about six months, to regain movement. When I had a heart attack, I cut out fatty/sweet foods for… well… a while, until my arteries felt as though they had cleared themselves of cholesterol. Doing exercises seems so much like a waste of time, when I could be doing something more productive. I felt the same way about playing scales, back when I took music lessons, when I could be making melody instead.
Jim T
Jim T – Well, that’s about what I’ve been doing with physio for 20 years – working my way out of back attacks. And now shoulders and knees . . . We could start an Unhappy Exercisers Support Group, maybe, but who would do the maintenance work for that?