Thammie Sy

Over lunch today, I once again had to tell Mika to sit properly. She has this habit of leaning and putting all her weight on one side of her booster seat, which renders her body unstable, causing her legs to also take on an awkward position just to somehow keep her from falling off the seat (in case the seat belt finally gives). She also rarely listens. I have to be the one to move her and show her how to position herself, only to find her shifting her weight again. I usually end up just letting her be, praying that the seat belt doesn’t snap.

Every once in a while, Mika would suddenly cry and complain of having an “owie” on her leg. I would ask her to point to the exact area of her owie, but she would just cry and cry and point to her leg, frustrated and irritated. This has been the case quite a number of times already and so I have figured out that every time this happens, it is a classic case of having pins and needles.

Ugh. I hate that– pins and needles. I know how annoying it can be, and I wouldn’t blame her for crying and kicking out of irritation. I can understand that as a toddler, she perceives the sensation as pain and probably doesn’t know how else to explain whatever it is she is feeling on her leg. I also know that there’s not much you can do about those temporarily-impinged nerves, except maybe shaking the affected limb to help hasten the conduction of nerve impulses and help bring them back to their normal state. But then again, even that is still not comfortable since it would actually heighten the sensation momentarily until everything goes back to normal.

So earlier, that’s what I did. While Mika was all “distressed” from the pins and needles and not knowing what it was that she was really feeling on her leg, I remained calm, because I knew what it was and that it was temporary and a normal part of how our bodies work. I gently held her leg but when I tried to shake it while assuring her it would be okay, she cried all the more and hit me, thinking that I was trying to hurt her some more.

And then it hit me– a lot of times we cry and get frustrated because of some discomfort we’re going through in life and we don’t know how else to perceive it but to think of it as being painful and confusing. We cry and we complain and when God– knowing that it is all part of this thing called life, knowing that what we are going through is temporary, and knowing how to hasten the process of “healing”—when God calmly tries to shake whatever it is that is causing the discomfort off, we cry all the more and get annoyed at Him for not helping ease our pain. Sometimes we think He’s not even doing anything about our situation. But in actuality, He just knows better.