Polished Pain

By Molly Flinkman
@molly_flinkman

I trail my four kids into church underneath a bright blue sky. The air is cool. I cross my arms in front of me and walk into the building. 

There aren’t many people here yet because I am always at least ten minutes early on the days my husband, Jake, works shifts at the hospital. Mostly, I just like to be early, so I leave extra time to account for the inevitable missing shoe or last-minute diaper change, but also, when it’s just me on a Sunday morning, I’d rather drive around for an extra thirty minutes with all the kids contained to their car seats than deal with them by myself in our home. 

This particular morning, they woke up bickering and then just didn’t stop. They fought about who sat where at the counter. They fought about who chose what game they played after breakfast. There was much yelling and a few slammed doors and I was exhausted by all of it before 8:00 a.m.  I had also been exhausted by all of it the day before and the day before that. 

We make ourselves at home in a row of five chairs, and just as my two-year-old settles himself into my lap, a friend comes over to say hello. Her eyes smile at me from above her mask. “How are you?” she asks.

How am I?

Overwhelmed, is my first thought, although I lack precise words to explain why. Lately everything feels like too much. I can’t catch up with what needs to be done; my current pace feels unsustainable. There are three loads of unfolded laundry covering the couch, I can only seem to keep one room clean per day, and I forgot to send Lily, my oldest, to school with show-and-tell on Monday. I end almost every day feeling like I’ve failed in a hundred different ways—feeling like all I do is mediate fights and clean up avoidable messes. Also, I think the toddler is trying to destroy me. 

“Tired,” I tell her with a shrug. This is a version of the truth. 

I shift my son in my lap and adjust my mask and keep talking before she has a chance to respond. “It’s just that Jake’s been working and studying a lot and the kids have been driving me crazy. It could be worse. It’s just been a long week.” 

At this, the music starts on the small stage at the front of the room, and the beginning of the service puts an end to our conversation. 

Recently, a friend of mine told me about a conversation she once had with her therapist. She had been working to process something difficult she was dealing with when her therapist stopped her. "It sounds like you are reading something you wrote and edited," he told her. Instead of speaking honestly, she realized she had been offering shined-up versions of the truth. The pain she presented to others was polished.

Polished pain. This phrase gave a name to a practice I was already well-familiar with.

When my first baby was a newborn, my best friend brought over Greek salads for lunch one afternoon. “How’s it going?” she asked early in the conversation. I replied with some version of my go-to response: “Oh, I’m pretty tired. Still adjusting to the newborn schedule,” when what I should have said was, “I cry constantly all day and all night—it’s a miracle I’m not crying right now—because this child won’t sleep unless she’s being held. Also breastfeeding is so painful that I have taken up middle-of-the-night cursing to cope.

As a first-time mom, I legitimately didn’t know how to put words to my feelings. I assumed I was the only one experiencing the isolating bondage that can accompany childbirth, so I just went ahead and stuck to half-truths and glossed over realities instead of letting anyone know how I was really handling it all. In the moment, it felt easier this way. It required less blathering. It made me feel like I was at least in control of one thing.

Polished pain takes many different forms though.

When Jake, a doctor, quarantined away from us during the early weeks of the lockdown last spring, I took to including bright side tags in my text message exchanges with friends because I didn’t want to seem like I was complaining. Instead of just typing, “This is really hard,” with a full stop, I would add follow-up phrases like, I know it’s just a season or it could be so much worse or at least the sun came out today. 

All those add-ons were true, but they served as a deflection—a way for me to try to ensure people didn’t think I was falling apart. (Even though I was).

A few weeks ago, I met a friend for lunch who was talking through a pretty serious personal burden. I wrapped a straw wrapper around my finger and listened. I tried to offer encouragement and support, but I didn’t give her any indication that I was working through any issues of my own. (Even though I was). Polished pain, it seems, can also take the form of silence. 

I mentioned this tendency to Jake a few days later. We were eating takeout Thai food on our front porch after the kids were in bed. “Some of my friends are just dealing with really heavy things,” I told him. “I don’t want to add my problems on top of all that.”

“Don’t you think they’d be relieved to know they’re not the only ones dealing with problems?” he asked in return.

Back at church, this conversation comes to mind while I watch my kids walk to their various Sunday school classrooms. I’m alone in our row of four chairs when the sermon begins. My eyes scan the room. I see friends and acquaintances and strangers. I see their smiling, pre-church small talk, and I also see their sleepless nights, their health worries, their marriage struggles, their doubts. I wonder how many of them said they were doing well today, when really they wanted to cry. 

After church, another friend comes over to say hello. We walk to pick up our daughters, and she asks, “Did you have a good week?”

I pause for just a second. “No.” 

My admission puts an unexpected beat into the cadence of our conversation. I am tempted to walk it back—to shine it up a bit—when I look into her eyes. They are filled with empathy. They invite me to say more, so I babble out words about feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by all the demands falling on me. I cry a little as I use words like “fail” and “yell” without adding any buffers about the nice weather. It is all uncut and unedited and it is all met with the gracious, necessary support of a friend. 

The sun is still shining when I walk the kids outside to the van, but the air has warmed. The moment I pull out of the parking lot, the bickering starts again, and the familiar feeling of exhausted annoyance returns. My burst of honesty has not cured me of my problems. Instead, it has reminded me that the vulnerability and honesty I so often long for in relationships has to start with me. 

I suspect I’ll have to remind myself of this at least once every single day, but as I roll the windows down and let the warm air blow through the car, I am resolved to be the kind of friend who both encourages and lays bare. My friendships deserve my whole self.

It starts with me. It starts today. And I feel the joy of this realization while the kids yell in the background.