heart pinches

“-Mom, when did it hurt the most?” Do asks, big eyes wide, her broken arm bandaged tightly.

I stay silent and think.
“When your toe was broken? That hurt, right?”

I stay silent.
“When they stitched your knee, the one with the big scar now? That really hurt, right?”

Still silent, I try to answer the question for myself.
“Does it ever not hurt?” Do raises her eyebrows.

Moms hurt.
But the kind of hurt moms feel is different.
And usually, regardless of the type of injury, there’s one spot that always aches.

In the chest.
As if an old laundry pin is pressing down inside.

On the penultimate day of the old year, Do fell off the climbing frame.
On the way to the hospital, I looked into my child’s eyes… and felt pain.
His arm. And somewhere deeper, mine.

Why so many cars? Why so many red lights? Why is the hospital so far?
In my mind, the pressing pin made strange and entirely illogical questions arise.

Later, pacing outside the X-ray room… waiting for permission to enter and meet the diagnosis… I realized that time had stopped.
Out of place. Untimely. Unexpectedly.

But the minutes, which normally tick by in counts to sixty, got tangled in counting, and only near the end would they start over again.

It can’t be that time, which normally flies like a speeding autobahn and is always too short, can suddenly become so slow.
So long.
Can it hurt, these slowly passing minutes?
It turns out, when something pinches your heart… it can.

When I was a child, I often got sick.
And each time, down to the “allowed moments,” I knew Aunt Saulė would be called with that cursed metal box, where the “sharp-toothed” syringes I feared like the devil feared the cross would sleep politely.
So when I heard the doorbell and realized it was Aunt Saulė… I would flood with tears.
Mom would calm me and say, “You know, Moms hurt twice as much…” — I thought she just lightly salted the “under-tears” situation.

And then I became a mom. Twice over.

Every time I think:
She was damn right.

Moms get sick.
Not with fractures.
Not with injuries.
Not with burns.
Moms mostly hurt with strange little chest “pinches” — which don’t even have a code in the disease classifier.

And there’s no treatment.
Just this.
Don’t be foolish.
If something presses uncomfortably…
Take it and throw it away.
Rip it out like a stuck button.
Crush it like a shoe that rubs.
Snap it like an irritating splinter.

If you can.

But you can’t.
Or maybe you just don’t want to.
You press the one in pain into your arms and wait for the laundry-pin that has pinched in the wrong place to loosen on its own.

For Moms.

With a “pinched” heart,
V.