My Legs Hurt

Just got my 3:30am wakeup call from my son. He was crying, so I went into his room to check on him. “My legs hurt,” cried the boy. I sprang into action. I get it. I know this. I had this happen when I was a kid. I got the children’s advil or medicinal MJ or whatever the kids are taking these days. I came back into the room and triumphantly watched him drink the advil. I explained to him that his condition was called growing pains. And he was going to be fine.

Mission accomplished.

Except I didn’t listen to him when he had told me where his legs hurt. He tried to explain it to me. But, I heard “leg” “pain” and “in the night”. And tried to solve the puzzle based on that limited information. I can fix these tears. I got this buddy. Meanwhile, kid is trying to explain that it’s the tops of his thighs that are the problem. They rub against each other when he runs too much and were chafed. Whoopsies.

I had diagnosed and provided the solution to the problem before finding out what the problem was. A little vasoline and he was right back to sleep, but me…I’m awake thinking about how my problem was misdiagnosed five years ago.

It was around this time of year in 2007 when I was going to marriage therapy alone. Ha. That’s an awesome sentence by itself. How the fuck does that happen? It takes two to fuck up a marriage, but, only one to take the blame. Before getting kicked out of the house…before the stripper…it was up to me to get my shit together and get therapy-ed at.

But, the dude had listened to my wife’s versions of our problems in the same way that I just listened to my boy saying leg pain. “Oh, I get it. Marriage crisis. Husband is the problem. Well, this is an easy one. Read this book. Go to this seminar. How dare you not follow my advice?” Get fucked dude.

My heart was broken. I was so depressed. Such a fraction of the real me. I think a good picture of how far I had sunk was this guy telling me to write a letter to my dad. I did. I was supposed to pretend my dad was in the chair next to me and read it to him. I literally couldn’t get a single word out. I just welled up with tears. My heart had been broken by dad and by my wife, but my voice wasn’t heard by that therapist. And that was the same frustration that was the issue for me growing up and in the marriage. I was voiceless. It’s a frustrating and overpoweringly helpless feeling.

I could try to communicate, but what was the point? I could never win. A friend of mine told me one time about being frustrated in a relationship because every time she went to this person with an airtight case of how they had screwed up, she ended up leaving the conversation feeling like she had been the one who had done wrong. That’s how it felt.

So, I gave up on my dad at an early age. And mailed it in towards the end of my marriage. Enough years of never being right and why the hell would you continue to put yourself through that? I thought it was my duty. That’s what super duper Christians did. They endured miserable marriages. My grandma and grandpa were married 40 years before they got divorced. Holy shit that’s crazy. I lasted 14ish. That was crazy too.

But, crazy was the label I was given for not being “in it”. How could I be in it when that girl who I was married to couldn’t possibly be part of the problem, but wanted me to check into a mental hospital? That shit hurts.

I just laughed a little too hard out loud thinking about flipping that scene five years ago. Our church friends, my wife’s marriage therapist and my wife wanted to create movement…they wanted me to snap out of it and get back to being like them. Therapy. Mental Hospital. Pray for Matt and oh poor Matt’s wife to be put through all of this. What if I was the only sane one in the nut house? What if what I did was check myself out of their mental hospital?

I probably shouldn’t find that as funny as I do. But, here’s an example of why. I wasn’t seeing the kids very often when I was kicked out of the house. The wife called to say I could see them one Saturday. Sweet. I finally was getting a chance to see the kids. Baby mama called as I was on my way over to say that my daughter decided to play at a friend’s house and my son was napping. Are you fucking kidding me? I was invited over to sit on the couch by myself.

But, it got worse. A knock on the door. Here’s this guy from church that I really don’t know very well, but is the husband of my wife’s good friend. He doesn’t take a minute to listen to me, but starts going into how he understands what I’m going through, because his business might fail. Are you fucking kidding me take 2?

The whole scene is insane. The dude was essentially telling me that he knows that my problem is growing pains and I need some Children's Advil. And all that kind of stuff fucking kills me to relive that not just for me, but for the children’s sake. They got screwed. My time with them is almost half-time now, but it was almost non-existent when I was kicked out of the house. I can’t make up that time. I can’t just get that back. It’s gone. And so was I in that fucking train wreck of a life and marriage.

So, when the stripper didn’t judge me, but actually listened to my shit, it got the ball rolling in a better direction. And when my current therapist tells me, like she did yesterday, that she feels fortunate to have gotten to know me…oh, man it’s overwhelming, because of what I went through to get here.

Therapy was hard when the solutions made the problems worse. Now, I can't wait to go. I love to admit that I'm a fuck up and work on getting unfucked up. Especially because the response to my condition is no longer "you shouldn't be like that". The shame and guilt I used to feel get swallowed up by grace.

I remember running into an old church friend a WalMart one day and trying to tell him I was going to therapy. The look on his face was priceless. Therapy sounded awful to him. It is when your therapist prescribes advil for your chafed legs or rules where you needed grace.

It blows me away that my life had been one bad prescription after another, but then along came an 85 year old therapist with a heart of gold…who’s been through plenty of her own shit. To her, my story wasn’t shocking and awful. It wasn’t about all the sins I committed. It was about finally finding my voice…finally getting to the real me. Unloading all the bull shit modern Christian burdens that had been dumped on me my whole life.

Ahhhhh…that feeling of freedom and healing my therapist has given me is indescribable. God, I love my story. My therapist listens to me. And gets me. I don’t have to spend the rest of my life as the sane-ish one in the nut house. I can write and express myself and be a dad and screw up, but keep working on it.

And that’s the thing…I was thinking more yesterday about “getting it”. There are so many people who don’t get it. They will not stop applying the wrong medicine or will simply fail to see that they need medicine at all. Their souls are crying out in the night, begging for relief, but they’re unwilling to take the steps that will give them real relief.

I can tell the stories above and say get fucked or are you fucking kidding me, but really how would they know any different than what they’ve been taught? At the end of the day, I can feel sorry for and have grace for those kinds of people, because I used to be one. And that’s such an uncomfortable way to live life. You get this one track mind and miss the point. The point is getting better. Actually making progress. And part of my progress is realizing that I don’t “get it” either. I get part of it. But, I’ll never get all of it. And people who think like that are the kind of “crazy” people I like to surround myself with. You can keep rubbing your legs together until they’re chafed to hell or you can figure out how to get your hands on some mother-fucking vasoline.