Real Moms Have Scars - Revised Edition

It starts when we are children: a scraped knee, a fall off a new bicycle, a misstep on a piece of broken glass. They make up the physical proof of our adventures and mistakes. And there are the emotional scars, too: little wounds and infractions, a taunt, names called, abuse ingested and spread out into our blood, marking our cells, pressed into our hearts and minds.

There are things we swear, as mothers, we’ll never do; things we swear we’ll protect our children from. We can lift a pant leg and show them, open a blouse, bend an arm to expose the rough flesh of the elbow, and the lines of faded scars almost white against the darker flesh. We show them in the hopes that they won’t do the same;, won’t take the risk; won’t put themselves in a similar situation; won’t experience the hurt.

***

Pain knows no boundary. No race or class, no religion. Pain crosses every division, both real and imagined. Pain, both physical and emotional, inevitably touches us all.

Who doesn’t have a story mapped on their body? Who doesn’t have at least one mark that distinguishes them from the rest? A pattern of injury as unique as a fingerprint?

Who doesn’t have words lodged in their heart like a splinter, long and jagged? Who doesn’t have a catalog of grieves, of losses, of hurts. Who hasn’t received an open palm across the face, the sting of contact sharp, instant, and resounding? Who hasn’t been left, mistreated, betrayed?

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Our children enter the world, urged out through our bodies. Their very growing leaves marks, dark pink lines that fade to an iridescent silver. In their leaving, too, they leave their mark: a perineum torn or cut to let out the bulging, soft newborn head and slippery shoulders.

And when they can’t come out, they are pulled. My abdomen bears two lines that intersect - one for each of my children. They were retrieved because my body couldn’t figure out how to birth them. Those intercessions, those merciful, terrible scalpels, dragged across my skin, parting the flesh and muscle, parting the water.

I both love and hate my scars. Hate because they signify my inability to birth my children on my own terms; love because those were the doors from which I received my children, each one round and pink and yelling. Hate because they suggest helplessness, not empowerment. Love because when I am older and my children are gone, living their own lives, I can catch sight of myself dressing in a mirror, see the scars and touch them, sending out thoughts of peace and love to my children, wherever they are. Hate because almost four years later, they still itch, occasionally jolting me with pain shot out from nerves still objecting to their severing. Love because it’s a story I can show them: a good one, with lots of drama and an incredibly happy ending.

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My eldest daughter skinned her knee the other day, during a walk around the block. As we peeled back her tights to reveal the scraped skin beneath, she was hyperventilating with tears. There was blood at the surface, barely, but it was enough to warrant a cleaning and a band-aid. Her tears lessened, knowing she’d have something to show her classmate, and a story to tell them.

Each time one of my children gets hurt, I’m wounded too. I pick them up, crush them into my own body, rocking intently, trying to soothe both of us back into calm. As bad as those moments can be, it’s my hope that scraped knees and bumped heads is all the pain they ever experience. My knowledge about life – the joy and the ache – tells me this is not going to be.

But our scars can make us stronger; make us pull out our reserve strength when we swore we had none left; make us buckle down and do the work necessary to get better. So maybe my wish for them should be that they only experience the kind of wounds that ultimately enrich us; make us kinder and more compassionate; make us better people after a bout of hardship.

I’ll never stop wishing, as a mother, to be able to carry some of their pain, to lighten their loads so that their scars are the kind that almost vanish with time, leaving just the slightest flash of silver against the soft peach of their skin.

Leaving the smallest mark possible.

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When Kristen tells me to jump, I not only ask How high, but also What should I wear while jumping and Would you like a plain old jump or something with a little whirl and twirl? I'm a technophobe, but a lover of music, so the idea of joining the iPod bandwagon by possibly winning a contest is deliciously frightening. You know, my first contest won was way back in the mid-nineties, when me and maybe about three other people actually watched this show on Comedy Central called Short Attention Span Theatre. Well, they ran a contest where you could win an episode of Northern Exposure on VHS (hello, I'm old!) as well as a wonderful mug with a moose on it. I won! It was thrilling! I felt suddenly that much closer to my dream at the time of marrying John Corbett.

I posted my original Real Moms Essay back in March. I wanted to tweak it a little, because I can't help it, I must tweak! And the contest rules said only one photo, so I removed the really depressing photo of my wrist scars and kept the joyful/painful c-section scar photo.

Enter with me! You can win this really great 4G iPod Nano and chocolate and a link to your winning essay at True Mom Confessions. Um...chocolate...music...a link at a great site? What more needs to be said?