Scars

“You have a lot of scars.”

My son is standing next to me as I’m sitting on a truck-stop toilet, my pants bunched around my knees. He’s looking at my thigh. It’s extra pale in the fluorescent light. He is six years old and does not know what cellulite is, what ingrown hairs are — only that his mother’s legs are dimpled and marked in ways that his own skin, smooth and caramel colored, is not.

“The older you get, the more scars you have,” I tell him.

I see him a couple of hours later in the rearview mirror, shirt pulled up, finger tracing the contours of his hips where his pants had left an indention. I hear him whisper “scars” as he navigates the lines.

Those are not scars, I tell him. Those are indentions. Those marks are temporary, I tell him, left by something uncomfortable pressing on the skin. For him, it’s the elastic and buttons of his cinch-waist pants, pulled in tight to keep his trousers over his tiny rear end.  

Indentions don’t stay. You can feel them with your fingers for a time — a Braille history of your day — but your skin will plump back up and even out and present itself to the next set of pressures. Scars, though, stick around.

My son is seven now, almost eight, and he still traces with his fingers the indentions of his day as he changes clothes before bedtime. Now he knows what those marks are called, and he knows to expect them to change.

He does not yet have any visible scars.

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Before a scar can exist, it first must enter the world as an open wound.  

When I was five, I was running through my great-grandmother’s garage when I slipped and my chin landed on the edge of one of the concrete steps leading to the utility room. I don’t remember the pain or the bleeding but I remember being on an exam table in the tiny doctor’s office down the street and being held down by what felt like six people while the doctor stitched me up.

My chin is still sensitive to the touch. Anyone’s, even my own.

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I started therapy again. Third time’s the charm, maybe. I like my new therapist a lot and she seems to already have my number, which is refreshing. We talked last week about writing’s role (wrole?) in my life and how central it’s always been in my processing of emotions. I don’t think I had even realized this very obvious fact about myself until I started saying it aloud and complaining about how blocked I’ve felt for a long time, because I’ve been unable (unwilling?) to write candidly about what’s going on in my life since around the time my ex took me to court.

I explained that I have a hard time identifying my emotions in real time and I don’t really settle on how I feel about a thing until I have had some time to sit down with it and, in many cases, work through its particulars on paper. I told her about the times in my life when I needed to stand up for myself or explain myself or share my anger, so I had written a letter.

I write because it’s always been my best shot at being heard, at not being shouted down by another person or my own nervous system.

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When he was seven or so, my brother took a tumble from the monkey bars on our family’s swing set. Swing sets back in the day weren’t the bulky ergonomic plastic behemoths they are now; they were bony metal outfits with rusting, sharp edges and protruding bolts. As my brother fell, a quarter inch of bolt caught his knee and lifted up a half dollar-sized flap of skin.

It was the goriest thing I had ever seen in real life.

I’d seen horror movies. And I had spent more time than was wise looking through the anatomy and physiology textbooks my mother had stashed around the house while she was in nursing school. Those books introduced me to, among other horrifying things, the concept of degloving. Plus there were photos of cadavers sectioned every which way.

But those were images. My brother was flesh.

Nana took my him to the doctor to get his injury seen about. I mopped up the trail of blood he’d left on the linoleum. When he returned from the doctor, the flap of skin had been folded to its original position and there was a jagged track of staples holding it in place. The staples were shiny and strange and made his knee seem Frankensteinian.

A few weeks later, the doctor took the staples out and my brother was left with a crooked V-shaped scar punctuated on each side by a collection of dots.

I don’t remember how long it took for him to rip that thing back open but he did.

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During our first visit, my therapist asked me if there had been any trauma in my life she should know about. I couldn’t think of a thing that I thought qualified.

My dad hit my sister once but I couldn’t remember if I saw that happen or if I just heard about it. Did that count? When I left my ex, he filed an emergency restraining order and took me to court for the next year and a half over custody. Did that count? I’m currently watching multiple members of my family succumb to opioid addiction and untreated mental health disorders that are isolating them and disconnecting them from reality. Does that count? My dad smacked my husband and got into a big argument over “respect” a few months ago, and I haven’t spoken to him since. Did that count?

I guess it sort of depends on your definition of trauma, I said. People have been mean and done shitty things here and there. But no one has ever intentionally hurt me without having their own reasons, I explained. Not really.

You can imagine her expression.

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I didn’t feel the knife slice through my thumb, but I felt the sting of the onion juice. I’m not sure how it even happened or why I was slicing onions. I don’t even like onions. Two decades later, I can’t stand anything to touch my left thumb, and when I look at the scar or even think about it too intensely, I feel sick.

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We can’t do anything about the past.

I wish I had understood all the things that happened while they were happening. I wish I had realized much earlier that love and stability don’t require submission and compliance and excuses. I wish I had understood that alcoholism is a family disease that reaches into the future and touches generations even if there’s no drinking happening. I wish I had known that there was nothing special about any of it; that it was all fairly textbook, cliché in specific and predictable ways. I might not have appreciated that knowledge at the time, though. For all my hero-child impulses, I am equally ruled by a lost-child obliviousness/avoidance that prefers to be in the dark.

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My son is sensitive and quick to anger, quick to frustrate. I see these flickers of me in him and I ache for him. Not just for what the world can do to someone like him, but for the ways in which I have already not given him what he needs. The ways I have already, because of my own short circuits, transmitted the wrong messages to him or not given him the space and time he needs to grow and learn at his pace, the only pace he can have.

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We can’t do anything about the past.

Well, yes and no.

We can’t change it, but we can recognize it for what it is. We can call it by name and chip away at the shame and denial that holds our healing hostage. We can identify the parts of ourselves that grew crooked or stunted, around and out of the scars. We can handle those parts with kindness as we work to expose them to the sunlight — to make them stronger.

We can aim for indentions instead of scars.