This is the second of a three part post.
A few people over the years have pointed out to me that I have courage. This is something I didn’t know about myself, as brave is something I can’t say that I’ve ever felt. Whenever I’ve had to do something hard, it’s been with fear and trembling. But this is where the poets say courage comes to play: Looking what we’re afraid of in the eye.
If you’ve seen the movie, “How to Train Your Dragon,” it’s like when Hiccup reaches his hand out to touch the fierce dragon he eventually names Toothless. Hiccup reaches out, his arm shaking, his head turned away, until the tips of his fingers feel the dragon’s muzzle. He looks into the dragon’s eye. They become instant friends.
By now I have an angel of courage figurine on my bookshelf. She is standing with her arms stretched upwards in triumph. She was given to me by a minister friend who told me I had been a mom of courage to her. My friend is one of just a few people who know all of the possibilities that we have faced with my daughter. We haven’t shared most of them as we live in a town where misinformation spreads as fast as wildfire.
For me to blog about this aspect of my character is quite a big deal as it feels like bragging to me. I come from a corner of the world that seems to pride itself on not raising children who think they are “too big for their britches.” This mindset “kept me in my place” as long as it could. My daughter just wouldn’t let me stay there.
Quotations about courage have caught my eye from time to time. C.S. Lewis says courage isn’t a virtue in itself, but it is each virtue at its testing point. It takes courage to be honest. It takes courage to endure, etc. Poet Nancy Wood says, “Your courage goes with you, Your example stays behind, So the sweetness of your time may be known.”
My minister friend was struck by something I shared and it wound up in her sermon. I had yet another appointment scheduled with yet another doctor. This one a neurologist from a fancy children’s hospital. He wanted to test my daughter for yet another scary disease, which it turns out she doesn’t have. In sharing this with my friend I said, “that was my fear.” I didn’t want another useless test, but I went anyway, knowing I needed to continue to hunt for answers.
My next test of courage will come in a few months when I take my daughter to yet another specialist who wants to sedate her and stick needles under her skin for a nerve conduction study. This man supposedly is very smart. Without ever having seen my daughter, he asked the question: Does she struggle to make it through the day? Yes, she wilts. When I have raised this issue with my daughter’s other care givers, they have merely shrugged.
So off I go, putting my daughter through yet another miserable test, but this time knowing I may finally get the answer I’ve been looking for. So far I’ve had only half answers, such as, her muscle fibers are smaller than normal, but we can’t say for sure what this may mean for her future. How does a mother do this? Courage.
–Jennifer Sandmann
