When You Can’t Reach Them

I have been turning a question over in my head lately: What do you do when someone you love is hurting and you cannot reach them?

I do not mean when they are angry with you, acting out, refusing help or deliberately pushing you away. Those things at least give you something to respond to. You can address the behavior, have the argument, schedule the appointment or ask another question. I mean the quieter kind of pain, when someone you love is simply hurting somewhere so deep inside themselves that there is no obvious door for anyone else to walk through.

I know that kind of pain because I am that way.

When I am hurting badly enough, people cannot always reach me. They can love me. They can sit beside me. They can say perfectly reasonable things in perfectly loving voices, and somewhere inside my head I may even understand every word they are saying. But understanding something and being able to feel it are two entirely different things.

There are times when I disappear so far into my own mind that I do not know how to explain where I went, much less give somebody else directions.

Unfortunately, my oldest daughter is a lot like me.

She turns ten this week, and our family has been through a lot of changes. I know those changes are affecting her. She is not acting out. She is not getting in trouble. There has been no dramatic behavioral shift that gives me a clear problem to solve, a consequence to impose or an appointment to schedule.

She is just sad, and I can see it.

As her mother, my immediate reaction is that I should be able to do something about that. I should know what to say. I should know what question to ask. I have spent ten years learning this child—her face, her moods, the difference between when she is tired and when something is actually wrong—and somehow I am standing here looking directly at her pain without knowing how to get to it.

I can solve a remarkable number of problems. I can find the statute, research the issue, make the phone call and ask seventeen questions until I understand what happened well enough to develop a plan for what comes next. Apparently, none of those skills grants me access to the inside of my daughter's head.

I have tried talking to her and giving her space. I have tried being funny, creating time alone with her and watching her face while I ask careful questions, searching for the exact combination of words that might cause something inside her to open.

I keep thinking there must be a combination.

That is probably the lawyer in me. Somewhere there is a question I have not asked correctly. Somewhere there is a fact I am missing. Somewhere there is a door, and if I can just find the right handle, I can get inside and help her sort through whatever is hurting.

Except I cannot reach her.

The other day, I finally broke down crying to my dad. I told him I felt like I was failing as a mother because I could see that she was hurting and I could not get to her. I could not get inside her head. I could not make her explain something she may not even know how to explain, and I could not fix pain she was unable to hand to me.

My dad listened for a minute and then did something fathers have an irritating tendency to do occasionally: he made an excellent point when I was emotionally committed to my own argument.

He told me to think about myself. Then he asked whether there was anything he could say to me right now that would make my own pain go away.

It was rude. Not inaccurate. Just deeply inconvenient for a woman who was crying and had come prepared to present a fairly compelling case that she was failing at motherhood.

But I knew the answer was no.

There is nothing my father can say that will make everything hurting inside me suddenly stop hurting. There is no sentence my mother can find. There is no friend who can call with the exact arrangement of words that reaches into my head, locates the pain and carries it out for me.

The people who love me have watched me hurt too. They have probably felt the same helplessness I was feeling while looking at my daughter.

My dad essentially asked me why I believed I should be able to do for her what no one who loves me has ever been able to do for me.

I did not particularly enjoy the conversation, largely because I knew exactly what he meant.

I think I have spent a large part of my life believing love should be useful. If I love you, I should help you. If you are hurting, I should make it better. If there is a problem, I should find the solution. I am a mother and a lawyer, which means I have somehow chosen two roles built almost entirely around people bringing me things that have gone terribly wrong and expecting me to know what to do next.

I am comfortable with a problem because a problem gives me work.

Pain without a solution gives me nothing but a chair beside the person experiencing it, and I am beginning to realize how badly I have underestimated the difficulty of sitting in that chair.

I do not think I am alone in this. We say we want to support the people we love, and I believe we mean it, but sometimes what we desperately want is for their pain to stop because watching it makes us feel helpless.

So we talk. We offer advice, ask more questions and suggest therapy, books, prayer, medication, exercise, weekends away and new routines. We remind people of everything they have to be grateful for. We point toward all the good things they cannot currently see and become increasingly desperate when they continue staring in another direction.

Eventually, sometimes, frustration creeps into love.

Why won't you talk to me? Why won't you let me help you? Why are you still sad? What else am I supposed to do?

Those questions can sound like love when we ask them. To the person hurting, I wonder if they sometimes sound like a deadline.

I wonder how many hurting people begin pretending to feel better because they can sense that everyone around them is becoming exhausted by their pain. I wonder how often we say, “You can tell me anything,” when what we unconsciously mean is, “Tell me something I can fix.”

My daughter does not owe me a quicker recovery from the changes in her life simply because watching her hurt is breaking my heart.

That is an extraordinarily difficult sentence for me to write.

I want my little girl back to herself. I want to see the sadness leave her eyes. I want to ask one brilliant motherly question that causes her to crawl into my lap, tell me everything and allow me to say exactly the right thing.

I want the movie version, where the mother finally asks the question the child has been waiting to hear, soft music starts playing and everybody cries in a very emotionally productive manner.

Instead, I have a ten-year-old little girl with a lot going on inside her head and a mother who has been standing outside of it knocking on every door.

I am starting to wonder whether my job is to stop knocking so hard.

Maybe my job is to sit down outside the door and make sure that, whenever she is ready to open it, she does not have to wonder whether I got tired and went home.

That is what I have been thinking about since my dad talked to me. What if loving someone through pain is not finding the words that make them stop hurting? What if there are no words? What if the person you love has to walk through something emotionally that you cannot shorten, solve or carry for them?

I think you love them through it.

You make sure they know there is not one single storm in their life they will ever have to sit through alone. You stop demanding that they explain the rain and stop checking the sky every five minutes to ask whether the storm is over yet. You stop taking their sadness personally and treating their inability to reach back for you as evidence that your love is not reaching them.

Maybe love reaches people in ways we do not get to witness immediately.

Maybe my daughter will not remember every question I asked her when she was ten. I sincerely hope she does not remember some of them because, in retrospect, I have conducted several conversations with the subtlety of a felony interrogation.

But maybe she will remember that I stayed.

Maybe one day she will understand that her mother could see she was hurting and, after exhausting every available method of trying to break into her little head, finally learned something much harder.

I learned to sit with her pain without making her responsible for my discomfort with it.

That is the part I did not understand before.

Her sadness makes me afraid. It makes me question myself as a mother. It makes me want to search backward through every decision I have made and identify the precise moment I should have done something differently. It makes me want reassurance from her that she is okay because, if she tells me she is okay, maybe I can stop wondering whether I have damaged someone I would quite literally give my life to protect.

But that reassurance would be for me, and she is the child.

She should not have to stop hurting long enough to convince her mother that she has not failed.

There are people we can rescue. There are problems we can solve. There are phone calls we can make, doctors we can find, lawyers we can hire and plans we can build. Then there is pain.

Sometimes the person you love has to feel it. Sometimes they have to sit inside it long enough to understand it, and sometimes they do not yet have the words to explain it to you because they have not even explained it to themselves.

You cannot always reach them there.

The terrifying thing about loving someone is that love does not give you unlimited access to them. I gave birth to this little girl. I know the sound of her footsteps. I can recognize her cry from another room. I have watched her sleep with a fever, held her hair while she was sick and spent ten years learning the small details of a person who did not exist until I made her.

And there are still places inside her I cannot go.

I think that is what broke me when I was crying to my dad. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that being her mother meant I was supposed to be able to follow her anywhere.

I cannot.

There will be pain in her life that she does not tell me about. There will be nights when she cries somewhere I cannot see her. One day, there may be a person who breaks her heart, and I will not be able to love her backward into the version of herself who had never met them. There may be choices she regrets, grief I cannot carry and parts of her own mind she has to learn to survive without me being able to climb in beside her.

I hate that enough to understand why parents knock too hard on the door.

But I am trying to learn.

Sara Rose may have places inside her mind that I cannot enter right now. I know that feeling because I have those places too, and maybe that is the one thing I can give her from my own pain: I know how lonely it feels in there.

So I am going to stop believing my inability to make her sadness disappear is proof that I am failing her. I am going to stop asking a ten-year-old child to provide evidence that her mother is doing a good job simply by recovering quickly enough to make me feel better.

I cannot promise my daughter a life without storms. This year alone has already made a liar out of anyone foolish enough to promise her that.

What I can promise her is that there is not one single storm in her life she will ever have to sit through alone. She does not have to talk before she is ready. She does not have to explain feelings she does not understand. She does not have to get better quickly because her sadness scares me, and she does not have to look up from her own pain long enough to take care of mine.

I may not be able to get inside her head or reach the exact place that hurts, and I am finally beginning to accept that loving her does not give me the power to stop every painful thing from happening inside her.

But I can stay.

I can sit beside a sadness I cannot fix. I can hold space for words she does not have yet. I can survive the terrible helplessness of watching her hurt without asking her to pretend it hurts less for me.

And years from now, when she thinks back on whatever this season of her life felt like inside that little head of hers, I do not need her to remember that her mother found the right words.

I just desperately hope she never remembers being alone.

Maybe that is the promise. Not that I will always reach her, not that I will always understand and not that my love will somehow be powerful enough to keep pain from finding her. Only that when it does, and she looks around in the dark, I will still be sitting there for as long as it takes.

Judith Hampton

Attorney at Law

Hampton Law Firm, LLC

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