Weakness

Exhaustion.  The room spinning, head pounding.  Deep aches in my joints, in my muscles, sharp and intermittent pains in my internal organs.  It’s happening more and more frequently.  I’ve always been a bit prone to illness, but lately it seems worse, my body turning on me.

“Oh, that’s just God ans’rin’ our prayers, honey,” my mother tells me over a cup of coffee that I’d reluctantly agreed to meet her for.  Her voice is tinged with a deep Southern accent that I never picked up despite growing up in small-town Louisiana.  ”Not a day goes by that your daddy and me don’t pray up a storm for you, that God will throw obstacles in your path to lead you back to him.  I  know you don’t like it, an’ I know you don’t like me sayin’ it, but it’s the truth, sweetheart.  You will be miserable an’ sick an’ always runnin’ around in circles till you figure that out.”  She smiles at me, saccharine-sweet, as if her words had not cut me for the thousandth time.  ”We only do that ‘cause we love you.  You know that, don’t ya?”

I don’t answer her.  This is exactly why I’ve cultivated distance from my parents.  It took me years to realize that this is abuse, because it’s all I knew as a child.  Who the hell wishes harm on another in order to bully them into believing the “right” way?  I try not to hate her, because hate only eats me up inside.  It’s hard, though.  I hold back a simmering rage that only seems partially connected to my family’s treatment of me.  I’m never quite certain of the origins of that deep fury.

I’ve scheduled another doctor’s appointment, but I’m sure they’ll say the same thing they’ve always said.  They don’t know what’s wrong with me, why my body fails me.