Today I was describing a part of my day to my daughter, specifically about the “Blood Battle” that is going on between our school and a rival.  Not blood per say as in fighting each other to a bloody pulp, but more in the shape of a blood drive with the American Red Cross at the center.  So, knowing that my daughter is a sponge for all things scientific and cool, I shared my experience of how I donated blood.  I told her about how I learned of a new way to do donate blood besides just the traditional way where donors give whole blood (consisting of red cells, plasma and platelets).  I’d never heard of the a new automated process that I got to do called “double red cell donation,” where donors like myself can give just the red cells, and not just my red cells, but two units of red cells, which is the component of blood that is in the greatest demand!  How cool is that!?  So, being that this was so awesome, and that I got a great t-shirt for this experience, I described to her this fantastic process and how it makes my heart feel comfort knowing that something from within me can be shared, and shared with someone in need, and even help to heal!

Imagine my heart stop as I neared the end of my description and saw my daughter’s eyes enlarge and fill quickly with tears as she searched with her hand for the arm of the couch where she was sitting, as if she had to steady herself from this barrage of too much information!  My immediate thought, Oh no… what have I done?! Too late to wonder that now, it was obvious that I had crossed a border of assuming she was going to think the science part of it was cool.  She… in. no. way. shape. or. form. thought. that. AT. ALL!!!  I, Mrs. O-positive-blood-donor-super-mommy had missed the mark, big time.

All my daughter thought was apparently something so big, that she couldn’t verbalize it. After I stopped talking and tried to back peddle to fix where ever it was that I went wrong, and to get her to communicate what she was feeling other than the visible panic, all she said was that she felt like she had something rise from inside her stomach, leaving itself “sitting heavy on her chest,” and that something was “so hard inside, something as hard as an eraser,” and that it felt like “a net was grabbing it and cinching it tight” into her chest and that it “couldn’t move.”

As a parent, here I was trying to describe this cool thing (to me alone obviously!), and I somehow assumed that because she is a bookworm, and loves technology and science, and that she told me the other day, without a hint of worry or concern in her voice that her fourth grade teacher fed the class boa constrictor snake a white mouse, and the snake constricted it, suffocated it, then ate the mouse tail first.  She seemed fine telling me that, saying it as if she was telling me that the sky was blue or that the grass was green.  Yet, somehow from all that, and other stuff in between, I missed that she just wasn’t ready to hear about the b word.

The more we talked about it, I came to learn of her fears, and that it’s not just the word blood, or the description of blood that makes her chest feel heavy and tight causing alarm which demands tears, it extends to thought of what germs do to the inside of you – they can kill you, or what snake venom can do inside your body – like paralyze you, and what cancer cells divide and how they can’t be stopped.  She went on and on crying and mumbling things I couldn’t even understand through her sobbing.  What caught me most was that I had witnessed her eyes open the widest I have ever seen them, and I saw the torrent of sobs she unleashed, which was unlike anything that had come out of her before.  It all underscored a fear that had been lurking under her surface waiting for this moment, and my saying the trigger word!  I opened my big mouth, and brought on the panic!  Me!  Talking about the cool centrifuge that spun my blood to make it into two parts, bla, bla, bla…. it created a vortex of uncontrolled chaos within my daughter.

So strange in looking at it from an afternoon’s distance that something on one side, so life giving – donating blood to someone who could die if they don’t get it, while on the other side, sharing it with my daughter who I had to talk down off a ledge of fear for about an hour because it was too much information, which ignited all the other things that were connected to it.

I sat with her in my arms trying to comfort her and listen to her heart and fear, and I asked many questions to try to understand better her inner turmoil.  And, to be brutally honest, I find it sad knowing that I still gave one cliché or churchy response to her fear, in saying the verse “Perfect love casts out fear.”  Really now, what does that mean to young girl in this situation mama?!  *sigh, note to self:  next time just shut up and listen*  Anyway, in the end, her near hyperventilating stopped and she settled and we talked about ways that she could express what is building up within her that said she doesn’t know how to talk about.  We talked about how she could use her artistic gift to illustrate her concerns or to journal out words that provoke thoughts in her so that they don’t threaten to overwhelm her.