Words as band-aids

February 29th, 2012 (leap year-so weird)

            On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was

            thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and

            moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask

            you right here to please agree that a scar is never ugly. That is what

            scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agree-

            ment to defy them. We must see all the scars as beauty. Okay? This

            will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on

            the dying. A scar means, I survived.

                                                -from “Little Bee: A Novel” by Chris Cleave

I read this book recently and I will never forget this passage. Written in the voice of a young, female refugee whose character I fell in love with. I also recently read the book, "The Help," and saw the movie and these two works of historical fiction (my favorite genre of book) struck me. 

"You is kind. You is smart. You is important."

They have me thinking about scars, both emotional and physical, and how words from kind people in our life can help us heal. Or the words we tell ourselves. 

We all have scars, some are deep down and we barely notice them at all anymore; some are right on the surface and you look at them every day. I love the first passage. It will change the way I look at physical scars forever. Though sometimes the emotional scars that come with those outward physical scars are the ones that need the healing. 

I have very few scars on my body. I have a scar above my left eyebrow from when I had the chicken pox as a child. I have a scar on my right thumb from slicing it open on an enormous can of hot fudge when I worked at the DQ in high school. And I have four scars on my abdomen. One from my cesarean section and most recently three from the laproscopic removal of my right fallopian tube and my babe. Most of the time I do not notice them at all anymore, they are hidden. As are the emotional scars. Most of the time, I don't notice those either. It has been two months since my surgery and I have been feeling pretty upbeat for the majority of the time. 

I meet women every day who are newly  pregnant or having babies and I'm fine. I like it. I like caring for women during their childbearing years. I am also okay at counseling women who want to terminate a pregnancy. I can, for the most part, hold it together when I am talking to someone who has recently found out about a miscarriage, though these are the ones that make me well up with tears. The women I feel a special connection with. I hope that my words to them during their time of suffering provide some sort of emotional band-aid or salve to help them heal. 

I have written about how much words can sting an emotional wound. Unintentionally, many people say things that feel like lemon juice upon your recent cut. But words can also help us heal. Simple words,  quiet words, peaceful words. Sometimes friends give me word band-aids. Sometimes authors give us all word band-aids. Sometimes perfect strangers give us word band-aids. 

Thank you to my friends and family for the word band-aids. The salve on my aching heart. The cool compress on my raging anger. 

I am a person

February 23, 2012

Parenthood and Personhood

I have been trying for weeks to gather my thoughts into some profound and succinct blog regarding my feelings about the recent debates and legislation that has been proposed to limit women’s reproductive rights and define “personhood” as the time of conception.

It simply comes down to this. I am a person. I have been one for 37 years---give or take depending on your definition of when I became a person. Struggling with infertility and miscarriage has been awful. Having an emergent surgery to remove a living ectopic pregnancy from my body was the hardest, darkest thing I have grappled with. I am a person. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am sorry that the fetus I grew did so in the wrong place in my body, but I am not sorry that I am still a mother and a wife and I am not sorry that the surgery took place before my tube ruptured, before I had internal bleeding, before complications arose.

I am a person. 

Resiliency

February 9, 2012

Resiliency

This past Monday morning, my husband watched the medical examiner take my neighbor’s body out of his home in a body bag. We don’t really know what happened. We didn’t really know the man. He was pleasant and quiet and we only made small talk in the summer while doing yard work or in the winter when we happened to be out shoveling at the same time. There have been rumors of suicide, but I don’t know anything for sure. And that is private business, but it certainly got me thinking.

I think about depression and suicide often. Probably more often than most people do. I have been depressed before, and I have hated life before, but I have never been suicidal. But I know that I have watched many people in my lifetime in darkness. I have watched depression and hopelessness eat all the light out of a person’s body. No one in my lifetime that I am close to has committed suicide, but too many have had frequent thoughts about it.

When I was a young girl, probably about 12 or 13 years old, I watched from the end of the hallway as my mother told my father she was thinking of a divorce. I did not hear the entire conversation, but I did hear my dad say, “If you leave me, I would kill myself.” And she never left. She would be appalled that I am writing about this-she may even deny it, but that memory is forever etched into my life. He was a very depressed man. His life was dark and though I begged my mom to leave him on more than one occasion, I understand why she did not. We never talked about it.

I had a friend in high school call me on the phone one night to tell me she was locked in the bathroom and was thinking of taking a bottle of pills. My memory of that night is a bit of a blur. I don’t know what I said to her exactly, but I do know that I never told an adult about it and the fear that settled into my chest while talking with her was heavy and cold. She didn’t do it. We never talked about it.

A very close friend of mine had a plan-a well-thought-out, easy-to-access plan for killing himself. We had an agreement of how he would let me know so that I would know how to find him. I sat in his darkness with him for many years. I was an adult. We talked about it.

And then I read a blog recently by The Blogess in which she discusses her depression and her reservations about discussing it on such a public forum. And it got me thinking about how our society deals with grief, loss, depression, death. We’re not good at it.

This made me think of resiliency. It is a term I often used during my years as an educator, but I often find myself using as a midwife as well. Some kids have it, others do not-you can see it even in newborns-the fight, the vigor, the will to push past the trauma.

Resiliency.

I think of the definition in relation to an ecosystem; our life’s journey and our psyche as part of our internal ecosytem.

Resiliency: the ability of an ecosystem to return to its’ original state after being disturbed. 

I think of women and men who have been through extreme trauma: war, rape, abduction, bearing witness to trauma. Some people’s ecosystem will, at least on the outside, return to it’s original state after being disturbed. Yes, they are forever changed, however they eat, drink, dress, and live and somewhere, deep under the fresh moss and dewy grass-the soil underneath was tainted with some toxic event. But they are resilient.