No, you Don’t

Why some sentiments of support are best unsaid

Molly Froude

One thing that really used to get to me, and still does, to an extent, is people coming out with things without first of all considering the gravity of what they are saying, or without considering how practical or helpful it is. It happens all the time, and it’s everywhere.

In the context of disability or serious/chronic illness, the main one I’m thinking about is people seemingly offering to take the suffering away from you. When I got diagnosed with MS, my mother (and maybe my father as well; I can’t remember) used to always say “If I could take your place and have MS instead of you, I would do so in a heartbeat.” Even better if she said “I wish I could have had MS instead of you.” I mean, OK, sure...but you can’t?

I don’t want to sound ungrateful here. I also don’t want to make my parents out to be bad people, because this isn’t the platform for that. But it used to irritate me, even as a teenager. First of all, it is counter productive, because even if I would bestow this lifelong illness onto my poor mother, so she could go through the pain, uncertainty, and difficult decisions that inevitably come with most disabilities, I couldn’t. There is no way in the world I can make it so that she has MS instead of me, even if she willingly offered. So what is the point of saying it? Is it designed to make me feel better, or her?

As for ‘wishing’ to have MS - does anyone actually want to be this unhealthy? As I’m writing this, I can’t feel my legs. I have far more back pain than I should at my age, and my knees crunch when I walk. I can sleep for twelve hours and still feel like I’ve not slept at all. I have to take painkillers on my break to get through a shift at work most days. Is my dear mother really trying to tell me she wishes all of that for herself? I guess it almost felt patronising to me. Like, do you think this is easy? Because it’s actually quite hard.

Is watching your child suffer from a disability worse than suffering with it yourself? I couldn’t answer this from personal experience, because I don’t have any children of my own. But I can imagine it being really hard to experience. I feel like I let my parents down. All they wanted was a healthy child, and they got me. They did everything right, and I still got sick. That’s not their fault, but it’s not my fault either. And I don’t really speak to either of my parents anymore for a number of reasons, but despite that, I’m almost glad that I’m the one who is not very well, not them. Maybe that’s because I know how hard it is, and I know how much I can cope with. My mum and dad do not.

At the end of the day, everyone has hardships to go through in their lives, and MS is one of mine. I’ve made peace with it. I don’t need anyone to take it away from me to lighten the load, even if that were actually possible. But another thing I don’t need is coming forward like a knight in shining armour wishing that they could take my MS away and give it to themselves instead, because in that completely hypothetical situation, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t make anyone happier.

Do my parents wish that they didn’t have to see me in pain, or lame from my MS? Probably, yeah. But do they really, genuinely want to experience it themselves? No, they don’t.