I AM bad at surrendering, to anything. It goes against a need for self-reliance that lies deep within me. My transplant operation taught me the beauty of submitting to my new physical weakness, even if I wasn’t that good at it. (Just so you know, it took me a while to bring myself to write those sentences. Me admitting surrender and submission? It’s a hot summer here, but it may just snow.)
When the physio arrived the day after the operation to make me walk — I think I made it around the bed — I wanted to do it, to be impressive, to prove to myself I was undefeated. I needed her to lean on. Lesson one in humility.
I was enormously proud that I left hospital fairly quickly, after two weeks. It proved to me that I was strong and somehow special. But here’s the truth: after 10 days in hospital a doctor said, “Well, we think you can go today.” Part of me crowed with pride, but there was another part of me that didn’t want to go, that worried about how I would cope at home. I was afraid of my need for help.
When I did go home I wanted to get going, to cook and clean and look after myself, to regain my place as mother, queen of my domain. The doctors, however, had demanded that I not be alone and my mother-in-law came to stay and do all of those things. Part of me wanted to do them myself, but I found them enormously tiring and I had to let go and let her take over. For someone like me, bent on proving my independence and regaining my place, that was humbling too.
The thing is, I didn’t stop being wife and mother and even a friend when I was so weak, but for a time I lost the outward power of those roles. I was forced to surrender to my weakness and to others’ love and care. I was enormously humbling when I realised that people loved me, not for the things that I do, but for who I am.
After a year I was mostly myself again, those first three months off work, slowly recuperating seemed fairly distant. They seem even further away now, almost three years later, but it is good to remember that weakness and that even in it I was loved.
Our society is full of individualism, and we are so often judged on what we do. When we meet people, one of the first questions is often, “What do you do for a living?”
The tendency to independence runs swiftly in my blood, but having had this transplant is a constant reminder that I am not here because of myself and I am not loved only for what I can do. I certainly had a hand in my recovery, but I am here because of the love and care of so many others.
Delivered. 