Tonight I had a tough time putting my daughter to bed. She kind of threw a tantrum . . . screaming and yelling. I told her that if she wanted to behave that way, she could go ahead, but I wouldn’t sit there and tolerate it. With that, I turned off her light, left the room, closed the door behind me, and went down stairs.
This didn’t help the matter. She screamed all the more . . . and cried, and pleaded for me to return.
Hearing my daughter scream is not something that I enjoy. Especially when she is crying for me to come to her. It causes me pain. I know that at times I need to endure this in order to help her mature, but it’s never easy for me to hear her cry.
But I noticed something about myself tonight that I hadn’t really reflected upon before. Standing downstairs, listening to her scream, I found myself laughing every few moments. I’ve experienced this many times before, but never really reflected upon it till now.
Why was I laughing? Nothing was funny! In fact, this was a very painful moment for me, and my brief moments of laughter couldn’t bury the pain of it.
So why was I laughing?
They say that when the sense of smell is overpowered, it shuts down completely. This is why spraying on ten pumps of perfume is nothing more than a waste of good perfume. One pump is subtle enough to be sensed when people are close to you. Ten pumps causes the scent of the perfume to exceed the bandwidth of the olfactory system, which causes it to shut down entirely.
I laughed because the moment exceeded my emotional bandwidth. Laughter is what happens when I shut down emotionally. I couldn’t allow myself to feel the full extent of the pain of the moment, and so I subconsciously allowed myself momentary emotional vacations to the land of laughter.
Did you know that I have a daughter in Indonesia? My wife and I spent an entire month there in 2007 trying to adopt her. We found her in an orphanage on a small island in December of 2006. We spent the next 7 months preparing to bring her back to America with us . . . we moved into a bigger home and furnished her bedroom, and we enrolled her in a Christian school and paid her tuition. Then we researched and studied as we sought to discover the best way to bring her back with us in a timely manner.
The plan was set. We returned to retrieve her in August of 2007. The first week we were there was intense as she became deathly ill and we spent 7 days with her in the hospital. We spent the rest of the trip traveling from office to office, filing this form and that form . . . We obtained her passport and all of her travel documents, and we purchased her plane ticket back to America with us (thanks to the generosity of several of our loved ones back in the states).
Then, two days before we were scheduled to begin our new life together, the whole plan fell apart. We were denied. We tried everything that we could have tried . . . to no avail.
We asked our ministry partners and dear friends in Medan to watch over her, and they graciously agreed. There was nothing more we could do. We took her to them, and then we came home.
Seven years have passed. Today is her 16th birthday. As I wrote “Happy Birthday” to her on her Facebook wall, the pain came rushing back into my heart, and I remembered. I remembered the moment I saw her in that orphanage. She stood out to me amongst all of the children there. Her short haircut accentuated the brightness of her eyes and the whiteness of her smile.
Nama saya Noverita Mendrofa, she said. Saya tujuh tahun. “My name is Noverita Mendrofa. I am seven years old.”
I sat her on my lap, and looked into my wife’s eyes and knew that she saw what I saw. That night we spoke about bringing her back home to live with us, and the decision was made with joy and tears.
Tonight I remembered, and I felt the pain.
The pain . . . where has it been? I’ve been laughing for seven years now, and I just realized it. When I returned to America on August 30th, 2007, the pain exceeded my emotional bandwidth. I just couldn’t allow myself to feel it. I wondered how I was able to move on so quickly, and now I know.
I shut down.
But now I see that shutting down doesn’t work. Numbness doesn’t mean you don’t feel; it means you feel too much. The land of laughter is no proper escape from the land of pain. Laughter was never meant to be a city of refuge; it is not meant to be a walled city, but a city without walls.
Our laughter should rightly open us up, not close us up. It should be the mark of our authenticity, not of our flight from reality.
The only alternative to running from the pain is living through the pain.
Living through the pain means recognizing the importance of it, the significance of it. Pain is important. Pain is significant. Feeling the pain is the path to the remembrance of forgotten love.
Looking at the Facebook profile of the object of my failed Indonesian adoption reminded me of a love that once permeated my heart . . . a love for this little girl named Noverita Mendrofa. I didn’t realize that by refusing to allow myself to feel the pain, I was also refusing to allow myself to feel the love.
Sometimes pain causes us to forget to love. This doesn’t mean that the love doesn’t reside in our hearts . . . I’ve always loved that little girl, and I always will. But the love can get buried so deeply under the pain that we almost forget it’s there.
…
Before long, I realized that allowing my daughter to continue to cry it out was counter productive. She was becoming more and more distressed, and I knew that I could diffuse it in a moment. So I did. I went back into her room, picked her up and hugged her for a few minutes, and then laid her down again. Within ten minutes she was sound asleep.
But she’s severely jet-lagged, as am I, because we just returned from Australia two days ago. So she woke up again at 1am and came downstairs to where I had been sitting at the dinner table, typing away at my computer.
Did I ever tell you the story of your sister in Indonesia?
No.
Do you want me to tell you?
Yes.
And so I told her the story, from beginning to end as she sat on the kitchen counter, smacking away at a slightly over-ripened banana with an ear-to-ear grin on her face. She was delighted to hear the story.
Today is her birthday.
Daddy, why aren’t you going to her party?
She’s very far away and it’s not possible for me to be there.
But it’s her birthday, Daddy! We should all go together!
One day soon Sunhee and I will take Alethia to Indonesia to meet her sister, Noverita Mendrofa, who has lived for seven years as the daughter of a beautiful family there where she is well taken care of.
She has moved on. We have moved on. Life goes on. I will go on. But I will go on living through the pain, not around it. If I run from the pain I will inevitably live from the pain. Living from the pain means making past pain the referent for present and future reactions. When they say that hurt people hurt people, they mean hurt people who live from the pain, not hurt people who live through the pain. Those who live through the pain discover the joy and the life on the other side of it!
Pain is significant, but it is not eternal. It is part of the journey, but it is not the destination. And it is neither an obstacle to the journey nor an enemy to the traveller. To the contrary, it is at times the walking stick that you press to the ground in order to propel yourself onward. At other times it is the lifeboat that floats you across waters that you would not have crossed otherwise. And still at other times it is simply a reminder that you are still alive, that you have not yet ceased to live.
