It’s Sunday night and I’m in the mood to write, maybe because I’ve been cut off from most of the world this weekend.  This weekend was long and, well, just long. I enjoy spending time by myself, but not while I’m sick — in induces all kinds of feelings I’d rather not experience.

I woke up in the dark hours of Friday morning in the middle of a panic attack.  I have no idea how it started while I was asleep; that’s never happened to me before.  By the time dawn came, I was in a lot of pain from my neck to my feet.  I got out of bed to start getting ready for work and found that I couldn’t really use my hands, feet or legs very well.  This is likely due to a change in some medicine I’m taking, which I’ll get to in a second.

I was in so much pain Friday night that I cried myself to sleep, so you can imagine my shock when I woke up Saturday morning feeling the best that I’ve felt in weeks.  I instantly sprang up out of bed and began doing all of the things that I’ve put off while I’ve felt bad.  It probably would have been smarter to have still rested during the time I felt good, but I couldn’t help it — feeling so much better made me want to cook and clean and be normal for a few hours.  Ryan had to work on Saturday morning and afternoon, so I had Angelina, Juliana and Olivia there with me, too.  It amazes me how much a part of my life those girls have become in only a few months.  A lot of people ask me how I manage to have them at my house when I’m not feeling well and it always makes me laugh at what the “old Amy Beth” would have thought of that question.  I remember asking one of my best friends, Ashley, what she did when she was sick but home with her two children.  She told me that mothers don’t get sick days and I remember this single girl being properly horrified.  I thought that, surely, she was exaggerating, but as it turns out, children still need to be fed and washed and clothed even if their mother — or in my case, their stand-in Amy Beth — is sick.

Last night, some of my friends wanted to go see a movie and, still feeling great, I decided to meet up with them after Ryan picked the girls up from my house.  I was almost giddy during our dinner together because I felt so normal. I’ve had trouble with nausea this past week, so Saturday night was the first time in days I felt well enough to eat a regular meal.

While we were in the theater, I started to get sick.  I made it through the movie but, by the time I got home, I was almost in tears because I felt so bad and was completely by myself.  And, well, that’s where I find myself tonight.

If I had to choose one of the strongest negative themes I have to deal with in my life, it would definitely be feelings of abandonment.  I don’t write about it too much because there isn’t a lot I can say on the subject without potentially hurting other people if I told my own story.  But, without going into specifics, I can easily say that from about the age five until now, I’ve had more experiences with what has felt like abandonment to me than I care to admit.  I can vividly remember being a child and fearing abandonment — even though I didn’t know what word to use to describe the very thing I feared.

A few months ago, I decided to do the popular “Ruth: Loss, Legacy and Love” Bible study by Kelly Minter.  Originally, I was going to do it in conjunction with a popular blog that was featuring the study, but almost as soon as I began reading the first section, I realized that I had two problems on my hands: first, I didn’t want to list my responses on a public site and, secondly, it was going to take me a long time to work through this Bible study because, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, I was going to address my fear of abandonment.

I’m doing the study with a friend of mine who has faced significant abandonment issues of her own and, the other night in my living room, we found that we could barely go a page in the book before one of us was crying in response to some deep hurt the study had uncovered.  If you want to find someone who probably felt abandoned by every human in her life and by her God, too, you don’t have to look further than Ruth.

Everyone responds to abandonment differently; to be honest, I myself respond to it differently depending on what day of the week it is.  Sometimes I’m clingy; other times I isolate.  If there’s someone available to cling to, I’ll normally grab on tightly in hopes that they’ll stay with me.  If no one is available, I immediately isolate myself in some twisted effort to brace myself for the realization that I am, in essence, on my own.  Two very different responses to one incredible pain: the feeling of being left by oneself.

Being single can be an easy segue to abandonment; being single and chronically ill further complicates matters.  I’m in a phase of life where I’m battling chemical depression, the loss of part of my hair, frequent pain in my muscular system, etc. while my doctor tries to figure out why my body can’t retain a vital nutrient it needs to work.  I’m taking 10,000 mg daily of something that most of you only need 200 mg of daily and, according to my last blood work, it still isn’t working to fix the problem.  I’m almost crying just typing that because I don’t know how to explain how frustrating this is, especially trying to do it without the type of support system I thought I would have when I first found out about all of this.  There is no way to describe the hurt that comes with feeling like you’re not important to someone, even when you’re sick.  For years now, I’ve struggled with trying to measure my worth based on what worth others assign to me.  If I use that system today when it comes to some of the relationships in my life, I would come up with a disappointingly low response.  I wish I could say that I no longer use that system to measure my worth, but the truth is that, sometimes late at night when I’m willing myself to fall asleep, I pull out that old measuring rod and find myself lacking.

I don’t have a neat bow to tie onto this post, probably because I’m still in the middle of whatever lesson this is that I’m learning.  I suspect that, if I learn my lesson well, I’ll come out of this with a deeper understanding that I need to rely on God, not man and that, even if man does abandon me, God does not.

Maybe I’ll be writing that post a few months from now?  I hope so.