Contrition

Trey Smith

My issues with a dysfunctional body began when I was in junior high. Initially, it was nothing specific; I simply began to feel vaguely rundown and out of sorts. No one in my family, including me, took it seriously.

By high school, I suffered through bouts of pain in my bones and muscles. I tended to associate it with overdoing things because I was a very active person. I played a lot of intramural and neighborhood sports. I walked and hiked a lot. I was also an avid cycling enthusiast. It was not uncommon at all for me to hop on my 10-speed for a 10 or 20 mile jaunt. (I loved my bike so much that I didn't get around to taking the driving test until I was 19 -- 3 years later than most of my peers.)

It wasn't until my college years that I began to understand that something was physically wrong with me. The periodic bouts of fatigue and structural pain were becoming more frequent. It got to the point in which, if I went hiking or engaged in some other strenuous physical activity, I KNEW I would be laid up for the next few days. This new-found realization certainly didn't stop me from being active, but it did temper the amount of physical activity I would commit to.

Because I had an invisible condition, my dear mother wasn't very sympathetic. She considered her eldest son to be a melodramatic hypochondriac! Even when I was diagnosed with degenerative arthritis in my late teens, she pooh-poohed the diagnosis. "It's all in your head," she told me incessantly.

No, it wasn't in my head. It is in my bones and my connective tissue. She had long been dead when doctors finally figured out I had been suffering these many decades with Fibromyalgia as well as degenerative arthritis and two or three congenital defects.

When my mother was on her death bed, she experienced a miraculous change of heart. She was dying of multiple myeloma and had recently broken her left hip. Because of her condition, the hip was removed and not replaced. She got around through the use of a walker.

This happenstance was very painful for her. At one point, her doctor mentioned that her pain was, probably, very much like the pain I suffered from daily due to my congenital hip. When she put two and two together, she realized that she had been very unkind towards my situation for all those years.

In one of her last sentient moments, she motioned for me to come close to her hospital bed. As I sat on the bed, she said in a barely audible whisper, "I'm sorry I was less than supportive. If your daily pain is anything like mine is now, I'm amazed that you have been able to accomplish as much as you have. I'm proud to call you my son."

In all candor, as I've looked back over the years to this brief conversation, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it felt good for my mother finally to acknowledge that there was some substance to my physical struggles in life. It made me feel good to know that my mom was proud of me.

On the other hand, it irritates me to no end that the ONLY way she could bring herself to acknowledge my pain was to suffer from something similar. Had she not had the issue with her own hip, I'm confident she would have gone to her death thinking I was little more than a drama queen. Sadly, my mother seemed to be one of those people who was wholly disinterested in trying to walk in another person's shoes.