To improve my English I started doing daily little tests on www.vocabulary.com One of the quiz questions seemed odd to me.
I had to select what trust means and was given these 4 options: explain, insult, hope & doubt. Well, it was clear that it wasn’t explain, nor doubt and for sure not insult. Yet to say trust equals hope seemed wrong. I even ended up sending vocabulary.com a message, telling them, there is a rather significant difference between trusting someone will do something and hoping someone will do something.
Not much later this happened…
Around 12 o’clock yesterday my telephone rang. It was the elementary school teacher. My daughter got injured at her head and I should make my way over immediately. For a split second I just stood there. Then my brain functioned again and in less than 2 minutes I turned of the hotplate (just started to make some pasta) I found her insurance card, my wallet, my phone (luckily not empty this time…), my car keys, I even packed 2 bananas. I was about to spur out the door, when exactly this second, my husband rang me. As if he had a second sense…I give him a brief update and spurred through the door.
Upon arrival, many kids on the schoolyard started shouting, “Maja’s mother arrived, you need to go that way”. In the middle of the schoolyard there was an ambulance, and even worse, a trace of blood on the floor showed me exactly where to go.
My heart leapt into my throat. I started to run faster and there she was…with a huge white head bandage and blood all over her face. It even dropped down from her eye. She was extremely calm. She answered all questions with a strong voice. No sign of faintness. Tears ran silently down my face. I kept saying “everything is going to be ok”. I am not sure whether I was telling this to her, or more so to myself…
The paramedic asked me several times, if my daughter seemed different to me. He was surprised, she was so cool, calm and collected. You could mistake it for being apathetic, if you did not know her. He asked her many questions and was very pleased with her answers. So was I. She looked like she had boxed with Klitschko but her brain was sharp as usual. She was able to tell him what happen, her address, her age, anything he wanted to hear. I kept murmuring to her (and myself): “I am so proud of you”, “What does not kill you makes you stronger”, “You are so strong already”, “My brave, brave little girl”.
At the hospital everything went very fast. I had to swallow twice, when they took of the head bandage. It was very obvious, this wound could not be treated with skin adhesives. She was so incredibly brave when they gave her the aesthetic injection. I had to hold a compress on her eye, to make sure the fluid wouldn’t run into it. Watching the doctor pinching the sides of the wound together and stitching her head, was really hard on me. I was glad my husband did not need to see this. When I said that out loud, the nurse smiled at me and acknowledged, that it is often even harder for the accompanying person, than for the patient itself. And men do tend to faint more easily on such occasions.
It was only when we finally sat in the taxi to go home, that she started to shiver. I told her it was ok to cry. But instead she took a deep, deep breath and was in control again. And we are not talking about a poker face here. She just really does not do panic. She just trust that whatever happens she will be able to manage it.
And I again realized that trust does not equal hope, it expands much further. Don’t hope things will be ok. Trust things will be ok. As whatever comes your way, if you trust in yourself and have faith in life everything is going to be so much easier.
