Grown Up Pains

Did you ever

get growing pains in your legs when you were young? 

My mother used to put my legs into a tall bucket of boiling hot water to ease my muscles while I clenched my jaw crying against her stomach as she bent my legs into what at first felt like cold ice.

I would wake the next day and I was still the same height, I didn’t extend any more.

Yet, over time – I did. 

Those sharp shots up and down my legs, with my knees finding no comfort at any angle, felt unnatural. 

I found myself growing in the moments in between those long sleepless nights. 

Red, raw and bare skin as my mother carried me to my bed and promised I would feel better if I could just try and fall asleep. 

It’s hard to sleep when you feel pain.

All kinds of pain.

My knee caps felt like someone was grabbing my feet and yanking and twisting them to a length my body had not finished constructing for. 

And that’s how it feels now.

I still get growing pains.

Grown up pains, I like to call them.

But they aren’t physical, they’re emotional and mental – in moments that tumble you around like a washing machine not knowing when it’ll end.

Yet it still burns, there are still tears, and I wake up in the morning and nothing remarkably extravagant has happened within me. 

I still feel the same.. just another sleepless night tossing and turning while my mind shoots a million and one scenarios and thoughts up and down through my mind. 

And now it’s an experience that is grabbing me and twisting me in to a place I am not yet wise enough to be. 

But slowly over time, I see myself grow. 

I feel growth.