Time Wounds All Heels

Last night Tater (1st born) had a softball game. She played well, even though we lost. We were short one player, so it meant that there were no substitutions the entire game, and everybody pretty much played the same positions. Tater mostly plays at 3rd base, and that's where she was all night.

At one point a hard grounder took a bad hop and popped her just under the chin. She started to cry, but when I went out to check one her she said that she wanted to stay in the game because she knew that there wasn't anyone else there who knew the position. The coach for the other team was very surprised. He had a the best view of it, and he knew just how hard she was hit.

As you can see in the picture on the left, it left a mark. The imprint of the laces on her chin was still there this morning. At this point, she's proud of the mark, and promptly showed it to everyone when I dropped her off at YWCA camp this morning.

So naturally when I went to visit Helen this morning, her remarks about scars and healing really touched me, and I've been thinking about this all day. However, I'm not sure how coherent this will be, so bear with me.

We're all a collection of scars, both physical and emotional. Tater has a scar on her leg from an incident when she was 4 years old. It happened while I was at work. Somehow she got a large shard of broken pottery from the trash can in the kitchen and cut herself with it. The wife found her in the kitchen bleeding on the floor. and she knew it was bad. The wife called the neighbor across the street to come and take care of Ittabit (2nd born), then she paged me to let me know she was on her way to Children's Hospital with Tater.

Unfortunately at that very moment I was locked in a psych ward in the middle of a deposition to involuntarily commit a very crazy woman that we'd just had to fight to subdue. There are no words to describe the helpless feeling I had at that moment, knowing that my daughter was on her way to the hospital and I could not leave to go see her.

There was also guilt.

You see, one of my jobs is to take the trash out. That morning I'd seen the trash was full, and the thought of the broken flower pot inside crossed my mind, but I was too lazy to take it out right at that moment. If I'd taken the trash out, my little girl wouldn't be on the way to the hospital.

I was finally able to get to the hospital in time to hold my little girl's hand while the doctor stitched her up. It took 14 of them to close the wound. When I first saw it, I thought it was awful, but the doctor assured us that the white spots that were exposed were just some fat cells, not cartilage as we first feared.

Later on the wife told me that she felt guilty because she was the one who'd broken the flower pot and put it in the trash. The reality of it is that it was an accident. One can always play the 'what if' game, but madness lies down that road. So I'm a little mad.

6 years later she has the physical scar. I have the emotional scar. I think that her's healed more fully than mine.

Scars are a part of us. All of our lives we collect bumps, bruises, and breaks. Sometimes we heal from the physical hurts completely, with no outward traces. Sometimes there's disfigurement. A blemish, a limp, or a missing appendage. Sometimes there's loss of mobility. Usually it's a specific something where we can point to it and say "it hurts right here".

Emotional injuries are different. As with the physical hurts, sometimes we heal completely. Sometimes the healing can only go so far. And there's not always something we can point to and say "it hurts right here".

Of course, the most difficult is when the emotional and physical hurts arrive together. Rape, abuse, and assault are some of the instances where the physical and emotional hurts are inextricably entwined. Sometimes the healer ends up with an injury.

When I was in high school I was what they called a 'Peer Counselor'. I went through a semester of training, and then the next school year I was available for an hour every day at school for anyone to talk to. I'm mildly embarrassed now at how often some of my friends used this to ditch a class, and then we'd go outside to get smoke pot. But there were other moments.

Another peer counselor, Sheri, and I went with our adult guidance counselor down to a small town in rural Missouri to help that school counselor do a workshop for the school. This was a very small school. Grades k-12 were all in the same building, and there were less than 10 kids in each grade. Over the course of the day, one girl sort of attached herself to me. She was in 7th grade, and very early on she put her arm through mine and said "I like you". Near the end of the day, one of her friends started nudging her and saying, 'go on and tell him'. She would grin shyly, and say that she was too embarrassed.

I figured she was going to confess a crush on me--the male ego at 17 is awesome to behold--so I tried to coax it out of her. After all, I'd be driving back to St Louis and never see her again. What harm would there be?

After a few minutes of reassuring her that I would still think she was a good person, and swearing myself to secrecy she proceeded to tell me that her mother had passed away recently, and ever since then her father had been using her to take her mother's place sexually. Additionally, her older brother had been raping her for several years.

I was numbed at first. I didn't know what to do. I tried to reassure her that I still liked her and that she was still a wonderful person. The hardest part was that her brother was present in the room at the time, and I had to fight a very powerful urge to go across the room and beat the shit out of him.

By the time I left, I had extracted a promise from her to tell her school counselor about what was going on. I talked with Sheri as we drove back to St Louis, and we agreed that this was a time to break the confidence and get the adult counselors involved. I told our adult advisor about it, and that was as much as I could do.

I was told that the girl was removed from the home, but that was as much as I heard. Since that day, whenever I hear about a case of incest-rape, I think of that girl and a wave of pain and impotent rage sweeps through me. Her face has faded with time, but I can still remember her voice when she looked at me, smiled wide and said "I like you".

I hope she's OK.

Now that I'm a parent it's even worse. I truly would kill someone who hurt my daughter like that. No remorse.

Protecting my girlies from being hurt is part of my job, and it's one that I take very seriously.

I also realize that I can't protect them from everything. Sometimes they'll get hurt. They will fall down and skin their knee, or break a bone. I'll kiss it and put a band-aid on it or take them to the doctor.

Someday there will be the pain of a broken heart, from the loss of a lover or a friend. I hope I can be there for that too.

As I'm writing this I realize that I could turn this blog entry into a novel, so I'll shut up now and save some for another day.

We all have a collection of scars, emotional and physical. Some of them we can show to others and talk freely about, and some of them we can't. Time does heal all wounds.

But sometimes you're still left with a limp.

~Easy

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