Scar stories
Early on, when the skin is fresh and tight and we are still hopeful in matters of love, we offer our scar stories. Enamored, we sit too close and trace each other's skin with our fingertips, tell of the night of the emergency appendectomy, the fall chin-first onto a step, the fist through glass. Later, as things get more intimate, the emotional scars get the attention. The stories grow more complicated: the nasty drunk of a father, the high school bully, the silence around the dinner table. It's a great show of vulnerability before the gates come down and love gets old. We find reasons not to trust. Our eyes dart to the side, to the ceiling, before they close in exasperation. The scar stories become faint irritations, reminders of our past.
My ex-husband had a scar I never saw. I knew the story of the kitten who gave him cat scratch fever, which led to the surgical removal of a lymph node on the underside of Mr. X's chin. As soon as the incision healed, he grew a beard to cover the scar. He was bearded when we met and was still in full beard the last time I saw him in person. The scar was his to hide. His third wife (I was no. 2) convinced him to shave it off, to show his scar to the world. I see him now in Facebook photographs with his infant in his arms, looking confident, clean-shaven, and happy.
Me? I have a short dark mark by my right eye, some jagged lines under that eyebrow. Car accident sophomore year of high school. The uneven triangle on the underside of my left middle finger came when I opened a package of smoked gouda with a dull knife on a car trip home to Ohio from Maryland. There’s a mark on my right calf from an old boyfriend’s too-sharp toenail. I don’t have to look to find it. I feel it there, remember the minor moment, the former intimacy.
As we age, the scars get more serious, the minor ones knit over with experience. These become our scar stories: The near-fatal car accident survived. The place where a breast used to be, where they excised the lump, removed the shrapnel. My grandfather was in his fifties when he was burned in an industrial accident. I never knew him without scars, his skin melted and fused, ears damaged by flames. He was always the cranky near-deaf man missing one foot, with knotty pine skin and thick fingers. No one cared or knew whether he had stepped on a piece of glass when he was ten or what that mark on his knee was all about.
When surgeons removed my mother's boyfriend Kevin's spleen, they left a thick track down the length of his abdomen, the ghostly shapes of surgical staples like railroad ties. Eight years later, after the tracheostomy, Kevin had a scar marking the experience on his neck, a scar that was reopened twice and didn't heal before he died. His frequent emergency intubations scarred his epiglottis, which meant that he couldn't swallow food properly. The food would go into his lungs, which was a pneumonia risk. He "ate" via a stomach tube for the last five months of his life. But the worst scars predated his illness. They were from his boyhood, from the beatings and the cruel words, the experiences that marked him from the beginning as the family scapegoat. Those scars affected the way he interacted with the world.
Physical scars are experience written on the body. It's the emotional scars that are more sly. They form when we aren't looking, maybe before we can even talk. They are pre-rational. These experiences change the way our brains are wired, help determine how we react before we are even aware of our reaction. And sometimes talking about them disturbs the memories, makes us focus on their creation in unsettling ways.
After about a month of appointments and increasing anxiety on my part, I dropped my therapist. Maybe it was a matter of therapeutic fit. But maybe I was stirring things up that were best left alone, tweaking scars because I thought I should, over a backdrop of bland therapeutic platitudes. Some emotional scars need space, to be apprehended on their terms in a way that acknowledges their integrity. After all, these scars mark our strength, our history. We survived. They served a purpose, protected us from total ruin, from being hurt again.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling impossibly scarred, I remind myself how far I've come since starting this blog. Telling my stories in my own time works. Maybe the best approach is to deal with the scars as they surface and to let them be until they do.
From a photo prompt very much like this image by dougfelt.