I am a little girl, and I am in Jamaica on a vacation with my family. The Caribbean is even warmer than I had imagined it to be. Accustomed to the bone-chilling Atlantic, I am suspicious of the balminess of these waters. I edge my way forward, away from the shallows. With each step I take I expect the sea to turn icy, but it doesn’t. My mother is swimming nearby. I dig my toes, which through the water’s lens appear positively spectral, into the soft white sand. The sun here is different from the sun at home. It inserts itself everywhere. I can feel my skin absorbing its rays, and I am entranced by this odd but exquisite sensation. Later, tonight, my brother will howl, both pained and outraged by the worst sunburn he’s ever had, and I will begin to understand that this sun, it is dangerous. But right now I’m a little in love with it. I am bread baking in an oven, and rising up and off me are heat and that delicious salty sea smell.
So I am not doing much of anything at all when my left leg bursts into flames. That’s the way it feels, anyway. I open my mouth to scream, but I am too shocked by pain, and nothing comes out. I try again, and now I am hollering, hollering for someone to come save me, or put me out of my misery, which at this moment seems to amount to the same thing. As if I am dreaming I see a lifeguard running towards me. As if I am dreaming I watch him scoop me into his arms and run faster, if that’s possible, back towards the beach, where he dumps me inelegantly onto the sand. Still I am hollering.
Where is my mother?
I throw up. I am embarrassed, humiliated, in front of this young man with such beautiful skin and the most musical lilt to his words. My mother arrives, finally (is she really loping towards us?), and he explains to her that I have been stung by a Portuguese man o’ war. Not stung, no, he continues, but accidentally touched. The creature has simply brushed by me. He adds that if the man o’ war had intended to sting me, I’d be a lot worse off than I am now. He shows my mother my calf, which bears the mark of one long and curved tentacle. The lifeguard is rubbing a paste of sand and salt water into my leg, and soon I feel a little better.
Until I experience labor, twenty-five years from now, I will never know a pain as intense as this.
++++++++++++++
Later, fingering my scar, which in time will fade to a silvery white, I think to ask my mother why she didn’t come for me when I started screaming. I am old enough to do the calculation: my mother, ten feet away, versus the lifeguard, eighty feet away. And yet he got there first. “Oh,” she says, “I had no idea what was going on. Sarah, you were just standing there doing nothing, and then you were screaming like I’ve never heard you scream. I thought you’d gone mad.” And here she trails off. I wait for more words, but they do not come.
If this is meant as explanation, it does not go very far. What, I wonder, if I HAD gone mad? The obvious conclusion is that she would have left me to stand and scream, stand and scream, until… When? Forever?
++++++++++++++
I can still find the scar on my leg, though enough time has passed that I have to search for it. It is visible only in certain kinds of light and from certain angles.
As for the other scar from that day, it is buried deep, and yet it continues to make itself known. It is an angry red, and welted, and now and then it throbs. Unlike the other, this scar refuses to fade. I think it may just outlast me.
Incredible post.
Oh, Sarah, this knocks the wind out of me. It is so hard for me to understand how your mother wouldn’t think to reach for you, scoop you up, comfort you. Even though she had no idea why you were screaming. I can understand why this memory would continue to burn. I want to give little Sarah a hug.
As always, this was so beautifully, perfectly, written.
The indifference–a pain that scorched you then and I imagine scorched you the day you gave birth to your sons and realized you would never ignore their cries.
Great writing, it just makes me ache for that little girl who is still inside you.
Oh, Sarah…having had a father who had no protective instinct for us, who took us to visit his prostitute, drug-addict girlfriend when we were small children…I know the ache. I want to tell you that we are who we are because of those scars. I wouldn’t wish the parenting he gave me on anyone, I am glad my children are oblivious of such neglect, both physical and emotional, but I know that I am so strong because of him. I think you are, too. I don’t know if I would have been, otherwise.
This is beautifully written, as always…I felt like I was there with you.
Your writing, and the relationship with your mother (if this is you and not a projection of a feeling) moves me deeply. It brings to light the pain that I still feel at every forced interaction with my mother and how many years it took me to understand the emotional abuse and how I feel about my own children: how I strive to become the parent I always yearned for.
Thank you.
Oh dear. This…kind of breaks my heart a little.
Today you are nurturing two young men and 1st and 2nd graders.
Your mother was ill. Sad that other adults didn’t help you. Reminder to us all to intervene.
Powerful writing as always.
I hope that you are able to let that pain subside because it is such an awful thing to have to carry with you. I’m sorry.
As a mother and a daughter I felt sick reading this. Yes, this is the sort of scar that doesn’t fade much with the passage of time.
Pain is cataloged deep inside, resurfacing in and out of time so we are able to add perspective to it, maybe refile it eventually as we walk in growing awareness and knowledge. If there really is ‘good grief’ it is because we look back and see that our scars like so many barriers in the stream, redirected our journey to destinations of strenth. Your insight into pain is healing for many of us. You have made it profitable.
Everyone has already written what my heart wanted to write. It is hard to be the child of an indifferent parent. I’ve dealt with my mother’s depression and subsequent emotional abuse; but I struggle just about every day with my father’s emotional abandonment. He was there physically, but that was it. I had always imagined that his checking out began when I hit puberty. After all, my mother said that he had told her that when I was in sixth grade he felt that he didn’t know who I was as I struggled through hormone changes and honest to goodness growing pains that made me cry and vomit. But just a couple of weeks ago my mother told me that my father had always been this way, to leave her with the sole duty of raising me, educating me, entertaining me. And she resented it. Resented me or him or that I caused her extra responsibility. He loved his TV more than me. Here I thought it it was only after 6th grade, but apparently he didn’t know how to deal with me ever.
I’m 37 now and I wish I didn’t still want and need to hear him say something, anything, to me. To cling to what he does say as if it’s the most precious thing in the world, and ignore, or honor less what my mother actually did.
This is powerful and heartbreaking. I was entranced reading it. I’m glad I found you (by way of Schmutzie).
like bread rising out of an oven. your words.
so perfect.
and this scar. i felt it for you. even touched my leg.
This is so beautifully told. Just lovely. And deep. And painful. and powerful. (The way I like my stories.)