{"id":7805,"date":"2019-06-09T16:46:58","date_gmt":"2019-06-09T22:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=7805"},"modified":"2019-06-11T18:58:50","modified_gmt":"2019-06-12T00:58:50","slug":"scars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/memories\/scars\/","title":{"rendered":"Scars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou have a lot of scars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My son is standing next to me as I\u2019m sitting on a truck-stop toilet, my pants bunched around my knees. He\u2019s looking at my thigh. It\u2019s extra pale in the fluorescent light. He is six years old and does not know what cellulite is, what ingrown hairs are \u2014 only that his mother\u2019s legs are dimpled and marked in ways that his own skin, smooth and caramel colored, is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe older you get, the more scars you have,\u201d I tell him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cscars\u201d as he navigates the lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s the elastic and buttons of his cinch-waist pants, pulled in tight to keep his trousers over his tiny rear end.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indentions don\u2019t stay. You can feel them with your fingers for a time \u2014 a Braille history of your day \u2014 but your skin will plump back up and even out and present itself to the next set of pressures. Scars, though, stick around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He does not yet have any visible scars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before a scar can exist, it first must enter the world as an open wound.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was five, I was running through my great-grandmother\u2019s garage when I slipped and my chin landed on the edge of one of the concrete steps leading to the utility room. I don\u2019t remember the pain or the bleeding but I remember being on an exam table in the tiny doctor\u2019s office down the street and being held down by what felt like six people while the doctor stitched me up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My chin is still sensitive to the touch. Anyone\u2019s, even my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started therapy again. Third time\u2019s 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\u2019s role (wrole?) in my life and how central it\u2019s always been in my processing of emotions. I don\u2019t think I had even realized this very obvious fact about myself until I started saying it aloud and complaining about how blocked I\u2019ve felt for a long time, because I\u2019ve been unable (unwilling?) to write candidly about what\u2019s going on in my life since around the time my ex took me to court. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I explained that I have a hard time identifying my emotions in real time and I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I write because it\u2019s always been my best shot at being heard, at not being shouted down by another person or my own nervous system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he was seven or so, my brother took a tumble from the monkey bars on our family\u2019s swing set. Swing sets back in the day weren\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the goriest thing I had ever seen in real life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But those were images. My brother was flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nana took my him to the doctor to get his injury seen about. I mopped up the trail of blood he\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t remember how long it took for him to rip that thing back open but he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During our first visit, my therapist asked me if there had been any trauma in my life she should know about. I couldn\u2019t think of a thing that I thought qualified. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My dad hit my sister once but I couldn\u2019t 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\u2019m 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 \u201crespect\u201d a few months ago, and I haven\u2019t spoken to him since. Did that count? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> me without having their own reasons, I explained. Not really. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can imagine her expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t feel the knife slice through my thumb, but I felt the sting of the onion juice. I\u2019m not sure how it even happened or why I was slicing onions. I don\u2019t even like onions. Two decades later, I can\u2019t stand anything to touch my left thumb, and when I look at the scar or even think about it too intensely, I feel sick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t do anything about the past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, clich\u00e9 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[][][]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t do anything about the past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, yes and no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t 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 \u2014 to make them stronger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can aim for indentions instead of scars.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou have a lot of scars.\u201d My son is standing next to me as I\u2019m sitting on a truck-stop toilet, my pants bunched around my knees. He\u2019s looking at my thigh. It\u2019s extra pale in the fluorescent light. He is six years old and does not know what cellulite is, what ingrown hairs are \u2014 only that his mother\u2019s legs are dimpled and marked in ways that his own skin, smooth and caramel colored, is… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3,355],"tags":[2373,500,2375],"class_list":["post-7805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memories","category-why-am-i-telling-you-this","tag-emotional-abuse","tag-family","tag-therapy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/3597468416_aa83eb0675_b.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s1jWWl-scars","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7805"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7830,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7805\/revisions\/7830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}